Faith And Action 



iNTRomjcnoN B^ 









rfflLLIPS iJROOKS 



■ >^/ if,.*-' «- * 



^.^> 






v * 













^Mi^^ 







i/ 









LIB RARY OF^CONGR ESS. 

^ai^XXi^. §ti^}rx0 !f o. 

Shelf ..t:rl.2>.7 



UNITEB STATES OF AUEBICA. 



FAITH AND ACT-ION 






FEOM THE WRITINGS OF F. D. MAURICE 



SELECTED BY 



M. G. D. 



:Si^ 



"^ 



^^ 




WITH A PREFACE BY 

REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D. D. 




BOSTON' 
D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY 

FKANKLIX AND HAWLEY STREETS 






1/ 

Copyright, iSS6, 

by 

D. LoTHROP & Company. 



PREFACE. 

ONE thing surely is true of Frederick Maurice — that all 
which he wrote was meant to bring light and help to 
men. It is not, then, too much to hope that such a collection 
of extracts from his writings as has here been made by one 
who is intelligently and deeply interested in them, will find a 
cordial welcome and a large opportunity of usefulness. 

All who have read the very interesting life of Maurice 
which his son has given us, know how full his days were of 
controversy. But they know also how far he was from being 
of a controversial spirit. Now that the controversies have 
passed away, the spirit of one of the greatest souls in the 
whole history of English religion may be clearly seen and 
felt. He who was so brave was very gentle. He who threw 
himself with such intrepid earnestness into every moral and 
religious and political question of his day, lived all the time 
in the prof oundest thoughts and truths which belong to all 
times because they belong to all time and have the Eter- 
nity of God. Maurice believed in God with all his soul — not 
as so many of us believe in Him as an Explanation of the 
Universe or as the necessary Condition of all thought — but 
as the very Life of Life — as the Being which was and is and 
is to come — as the Element in whom we live and move and 
have our being. Believing thus in God, there could be for 
him no dislocation of the present from the future or the past. 
The Eternal was here now. The infinite issues of actions and 

iii 



IV PREFACE. 

lives vrere already present in the actions and the lives them- 
selves. 

Nor could he think of Religion or man's relationship to 
God as something w^hich might be added to or taken from the 
life of man — something which a man miglitwin or lose, take 
up or cast away. It was man's life. To know God and 
Jesus Christ was to live. Religion, instead of being some- 
thing occasional, exceptional, the privilege of rare, strange 
souls, was to him the very flower and sunshine of humanitj'. 
It was no harbor into which man fled for refuge. It was 
the sea on which man's life floated and sailed. 

And thinking tlms of God, Revelation became to him not the 
sending and receiving of a message now and then, but the 
^hining of a perpetual sun. All History, all Life was Revela- 
tion. An infinite openness of relationship between God and 
man as between the Father and the Son, finding for itself 
in the Bible, and in the Christ of the Bil)le, the supreme 
utterance of that which all times and lives and books spoke 
in their small degree, this was what he loved to think and 
teach. 

The days in which we live are a good deal given to contempt 
of Theology. In this great teacher of our day there was a 
noble rebuke and protest against that feeble and enfeebling 
scorn. He was altogether a Theologian. For him all knowl- 
edge which deserved the name of knowledge was Theology. 
Our weak way of talking about Dogma as an excrescence and 
encumbrance found no tolerance with him. He was no dog- 
matist, but he got rid of dead dogmas, not by burying them 
or burning them, but by filling them with life. 

Men complain of the obscurity of Maurice. But it is good 
for us, so complaining, to remember what he himself wrote 



PREFACE. V 

once to Kingsiey — "After all, I care a good deal more that 
the thing' should be understood than that I should be — " And 
"the thing" — all the great things of which he wrote — have 
been understood through him by many who have often puzzled 
over the page to know what their teacher meant. The sources 
of the Nile may be very dark while its waters are turning 
deserts into gardens. There has been no great teacher of 
mankind in whose nature have not met the mystic and the 
moralist, the seeker after most transcendent truth, and the 
enforcer of most practical duty. And mystic and moralist 
never came to more harmonious and perfect meeting than in 
Maurice. 

The result of their meeting is a great spiritual master whom 
the world has already felt, and whom it is j'et to feel much 
more before his power is exhausted. One of the things which 
he most loved in life was to feel himself spiritually influential 
upon men very diflerent from himself ; men who, awakened 
by him, could then do works that lay quite outside of his char- 
acter and powers. That must be indeed a great delight. It 
must fill a man with humility and thankfulness. To touch a 
languid spring, to break the rust off a tight or hindered bolt, 
to free a doubt with an inspired word, to kindle a long life of 
energy with one flash of fire, to make a fellow-man see God 
— there can be no privilege like that. The wisdom which is 
not able to do that fails of the fullest proof of power and must 
be at heart dissatisfied with itself. The men who do that are 
the men whom the world remembers — or, if it forgets their 
names, it lives by their illumination long after they are dead. 
High among such men — pure, humble, real, full of insight 
because full of faith — stands the great spiritual teacher some 
of whose words are gathered in this little book. P. B. 



FAITH AND ACTION. 



I. 
LIFE. 

HOW easy it is to utter sentiments and to feel their 
truth deeply, how hard to connect them with 
real life, to bring them to bear on one's own conduct 
and on what is passing around us ! 

All our lives through we must learn by teaching ; we 

must gain stores by distributing what we have. 

* 

Do not let any of us, then, com])lain that our circum- 
stances are making us evil ; let us manfully confess, one 
and all, that the evil lies in us, not in them. 

In life and practice words are most real substantial 
things. They exercise a power which we may deny 
if we choose, but which we feel even while we are 
denying it. They go forth spreading good or mischief 
through society. Surely there must be something sol- 
emn and deep in their nature. 

1 



FAITH AND ACTION. 






The faculty of doing good, by an eternal law, is mul- 
tiplied and magnified according to the use that is made 
of it. 



* 



One can find enough that is not good and pleasant 
in all ; the art is to detect in them the good thing that 
God has put in each, and means each to show forth. 






The joy of recoveiy . . . the joy of those who 
cannot keep their happiness to themselves — who must 
call upon others to j>artake of it. Is not all joy of this 
quality? Are not these its characteristics? . . . 
Try to conceive the most selfish motive for it, still it 
only becomes joy by bursting the bonds of self. 



* 



. . . All deep truths must be found out, I think, 
slowly. They lie beneath all experiences of pleasure 
or pain. We are to grow with them, and in due time 
they will work upon us and mould us after their own 
likeness. * 



* 



Nothing is good that does not carry us beyond 
itself. 



* 



\Yhen we have some opinion which we are not sure 
of, which we cannot rest in, yet which is dear to us be- 



LIFE. 



cause it is ours, then the impulse to crush those who 
will not accept it, who cannot see the force of our 
arguments, is very strong indeed. 






Only the man who gives, hoping for nothing again, 
who gives freely without calculation out of the fulness 
of his heart, can find his love returned to him. . . . 
We see it every day; and every day, perhaps, we may 
be disappointed at finding some favors which we thought 
were well laid out, biinging back no recompense. They 
were bestowed with the hope of something again. 



* 
* * 



Retirement is good, but not as a luxury. 






Not the words which are appropriated to the service 
of art and philosophy, which are withdrawn from daily 
usage, but those which are passing from hand to hand, 
those which are the current coin of every realm, those 
which are continually liable to lose their image and 
superscription from the friction of society, these are the 
truly sacred words ; in them lies a wealth of meaning 
which each age has helped to extract, but which will 
contain something for every fresh digger. The word i", 
with its property of being demanded by a whole com- 
munity, and yet only capable of denoting a single unit, 
is a key to that mystery in words which makes them 
interpreters of the life of individuals, of nations, of 



4 FAITH AND ACTION. 

ages ; the discoveries of that which we have in common, 
the witnesses of that in each man which he cannot im- 
part^ which his fellows may guess at, but which they 
will never know. 

What is there in the force of gunpowder that can be 
•measured against this force ( of words) f If we had a 
barrel of that in our houses, what would it be to these 
words which we carry with us wherever we go, which 
we are ready to discharge so freely, with so little recol- 
lection whither they may be borne, or what work of 
death or life they may do ? 

(A mwi) is not dealing honestly with himself when 
he says there is nothing in him but what is mean and 
selfish. He may think that he is exhibiting a creditable 
humility in saying so. It is not humility at all, nor is 
it in the least creditable. On the contrary, he is often 
secretly crediting himself with being better than he 
gives himself out to be, often thinking that he may 
make a little capital out of his self-depreciation. He 
will not be humble till he owns that there is a good al- 
ways present with him, a good which he inwardly de- 
sires, a good which he ought to pursue. Then he will 
begin in very deed to feel the evil which is adverse to 
the good ; he will understand that it ought in some way 
or other to be cast off. 



LIFE. 






We need not study the records of the past, or the 
actions of our fellowmen, to learn what the sph'it of 
fear or cowardice is. Each one knows the gripe of it 
in himself. Each one Ijas trembled before the opinion 
of Society, or of that little fraction of Society with 
which he has to do, or of some particular man. Each 
has, perha2:)s, known something of that cowardice which 
springs from self-distrust, from the apprehension of 
lions in his path, from doubtfulness, \Ahich of several 
paths he should choose, from the foretaste of coming 
evils. If only some . . . shrink at the thought of 
certain acts being exposed which they would desire 
that none should ever know but themselves, is there 
one of us who has not been made conscious of tempers, 
habits, states of mind, w^hich he has longed to conceal 
from the eye of that Judge to Whom he is sure they 
must be most hateful ? 






The habit of regarding separate possession as the 
basis of Society, as the end which all Society exists to 
secure, leads directly to the expressions which we hear 
so often : " I have paid the fellow for his services ; 
what more can he ask of me ? " That is in other words, 
" Betw^een me and him there is no relation ; the only 
bond between us is that which money has created." 
That is the feeling on the master's side. And the ser- 



6 FAITH AND ACTION. 

vant's of necessity corresponds to it, " I owe him noth- 
ing:: he has had his work out of me. What more have 
1 to do with him ? " There are men, generous and 
noble men who listen indignantly and impatiently to 
this kind of discourse, who think it is increasing 
{among us). 

You may as well wait for the crowd to pass you in 
Cheapside as wait for public opinion to make a scien- 
tific discovery, or extinguish a great popular abuse, or 
assert a groat moral truth ; all that work must go on in 
closets with tears and prayers, and earnest fightings 
ao-ainst ourselves and aojainst the world. 

Many of us persuade ourselves, all of us have prob- 
ably at one time yielded to the opinion that reputation 
is necessary for the sake of usefulness. Every hour, I 
think, will show us more and more that the concern 
about reputation is the great hinderance to usefulness ; 
that, if we desire to be useful, we must struggle against 
it night and day. 

It is very good and useful to be reminded that all 
mere rules, all that we read of in books, have to do with 
flesh-and-blood human beings. Yes, it is good to be re- 
minded of this, even when we have to connect these 
human beings with crimes and with punishment. That 



LIFE. 7 

surely does not make us feel less that they belong to 
our race, that they are of our kindred. It sets us ujDon 
thinking how many temptations every man and boy- 
vagabond is ex2:>osed to that we are not exposed to, and 
what we mio^ht have done if these had been actino; 



upon us. 






States of heavy despondency do not last : perhaps in 
speaking of them they depart. Despondency is hardly 
a state of mind : it is the mind's forgetfulness of its 
own true state — which is a glorious state, as I need 
not tell you. 



* 



You are not sent into the world to get credit for 
freedom of mind, liberality, manliness, sincerity, but, as 
far as you are shown how, to bear witness of that which 
you know, to testify of that which you have seen. 






To own the height and depth, the length and breadth 
of the love which is revealing itself in all God's works 
and ways, to trace it in a few of its manifestations to- 
wards human beings, is better work than to discuss any 
opinions. So best we learn what opinions have meant 
to those who have striven about them most earnestly. 






Man seeing only himself sinks to the point where 
society becomes impossible — where every man becomes 



8 FAITH AND ACTION. 

the corrupter and destroyer of every other. Man see- 
ing himself in God, feeling his own relation to God, 
grows into the perception of a fellowship and sympathy 
between himself and every being of his own race — into 
a perception of the loving care and government which 
he is to exercise over all creatures of lower races : 
grows into this perception, because the divine character 
. . . dawns more and more clearly upon him. 
And thus the man is prepared for the last and culmi- 
nating point in the divine education, that in w^hich lie 
learns the meaning and ground of self-sacrifice. 

There is in deed and truth no middle path. The 
life of the individual, the life of society, must come at 
last to make self-indulgence, self-seeking, self-will, its 

foundation, or else Sacrifice. 

# 

The conscience is not a part of my soul, but is T, my- 
self. Parting with it, I lose not, like Chamisso's hero, 
my shadow, but the substance from which my shadow 
is cast. 

The recompense for not distrusting and suspecting a 
friend, for assuming that he means you well even when 
you cannot understand him, even when his acts would 
bear a hard construction, is, that you come to be ac- 
quainted with him, to enter into his character, to dis- 



LIFE. 9 

cover all the deep hidden sympathies of it. " You 
must love him," says the poet, "ere to you he will 
seem worthy of your love." It is a paradox in human 
friendshijj and yet every one may have proved it for 
himself. We might hesitate to ajjply the paradox to 
oar relations with God because they are grounded upon 
the principle. " Not that we loved Him, but that He 
loved us." And yet it is applicable there also. For 
He himself awakens in his creature a blind trust, a faith 
of expectancy, grounded upon the acknowledgment 
that He is that which by degrees He will show Himself 
to be. And, therefore, the growth of love and knowl- 
edge, and the power of cleaving more strongly because 
the attraction is stronger, are always proclaimed in 
Scripture as the rewards and prizes of a man who walks 
in the way in which God has set him to walk, who 
chooses life, and not death. 

Only three of the disciples were on the Mount. 
And only two or three, just at rare times, may feel as 
if they were carried into a brighter world, and as if they 
beheld things as they are, not hidden by the mists of 
our earth. I do not know to whom God grants such 
manifestations; but I have no doubt that there are 
some, probably those who have some special work or 
suffering to go through — humble people, I dare to say, 
of whom the world takes no note. 



10 FAITH AND ACTION. 






The God of grace and mercy gives to each that 
which he craves for : if we think that all is well with 
us, He will leave us to try whether all is well. If 
we find that there is something not well, something 
that must be set right in us, He will set it right. 

I dread, for all, i^idifference, not difference from me. 

. . . We may be of a little use, while we remain 

here, in giving warnings, derived from the experience 

of our own blunders, but if we try to compel any merely 

to walk in our stej)S, we show distrust, and not faith. 

* 
* * 

We shall profit by all that befalls us. If it is good 
and necessary for most of us to be humbled — if we 
cannot be anything or do anything right till we are 
liunibled, then be sure God means all that He sends us 
for this purpose. Sometimes it may be a great trouble, 
sometimes it may be a little vexing trouble which over- 
takes us. One may do the work as well as the other. 

. . . God knows which will do it best for each of 
us. Or He may send us good and bright days. They 
may tend to our humiliation as much as the others. 
We may wonder what right we have to them ; how 
such people as we should have blessings that we have 
done so little for. 



LIFE. 11 



* 



The secret of most of our misery is that we are try- 
ing to please ourselves. 



* 
* * 



Do you think it is liberty for a man to be left to do 
what he likes ? I do not know any slavery so hard as 
that. 

Distance of time is not always unfavorable to accu- 
rate recollection. We often remember a friend's words 
better, years after they were spoken, than the next 
day; because we understand them better, because we 
see how one of them rose out of another. 

Truth and liberty are inseparable companions, neither 
can live long apart from the other. 

The highest life is the life that sacrifices itself. 

. . . Men say " These things were so different 
when we were young ! How bright they looked once ! 
How they have faded ! " We all know that it is the eye 
which has become dimmer ; the things are as they were. 
Perhaps they never really seemed much brighter; in 
youth there may have been other shadows, which we 
have now forgotten. Only the heart is certain that it 
ought to enjoy, that it is meant to enjoy, and therefore 



12 FAITH AND ACTION. 

will persuade itself that it once did enjoy. It has a 
witness in itself that there is another kind of gift from 
these, a gift which is directly to the heart, and not to the 
heart only through the eye ; a gift that brings the light 
by which it is contemplated, and then throws light upon 
all things around ; a gift which depends upon no acci- 
dents, but which compels accidents to obey it, drawing 
strength and nourishment from those things which 
seem most contrary to it. And this gift, which all 
men know that they want, is that which Christ be- 
stowed upon bis disciples. " My peace I give unto yoiiP 

* 
* * 

. . . St. John says " He ^afh hlinded their eyes 
and hardened their hearts.'^'' We must not dare to 
cancel these words, because we may find them difficult. 
St. John himself interprets them in the next verse. lie 
reminds us that Isaiah spake these words when he had 
the vision of the King who was sitting upon a throne 
and filling the temple with His glory. . . In both 
cases it is the goodness, the beauty, the glory, which 
blinded the eyes and hardened the hearts. We know 
that it is so. Experience tells us that goodness has 
this effect upon minds in a certain condition. The bad 
that was in them it makes worse. The si^ht of love 
awakens and deepens hatred . . . This blinding de- 
structive effect of goodness and love upon the evil will, 
is a fact which we are bound to confess, and to tremble. 



LIFE, 13 






We never experience either the difficulty of a divine 
sentence, or the power of it, till we put it in practice. 



* 



Let us understand that God has been educating us to 
educate our brethren of the working-class, and all that 
^oe learn, all ?ce are still learning, . . . will acquire a 
new character, will be valued as it has never been valued 
before, will be changed from a weight into a power — 
from the routine of a machine, into the onward move- 
ment of a spirit. 



* 
* * 



We may dwell upon bright and hallowed ftioments 
of lives that have been darkened by many shadows, 
polluted by many sins : those moments may be wel- 
comed as revelations to us of that which God intended 
His creatures to be ; we may feel that there has been a 
loveliness in them which God 2:ave them and which their 
own evil could not take away. AVe may think of their 
loveliness as if it expressed the inner purpose of their 
existence ; the rest .may be for us as though it were not. 



* 
* # 



How many of us feel, in looking back upon acts which 
tlie world has not condemned, which friends liave per- 
haps applauded, "We had no serious purpose there; 
we merely did w^hat it was seemly and convenient to 
do ; we were not yielding to God's righteous will ; we 



14 FAITH AyD ACTION. 

were not inspired by His love ! " How many of us feel 
that our bitterest repentances are to be for this, — that 
all things Ijave gone so sraootlily with us, because we 
did not cafe to make the world better, or to be better 
ourselves ! How many of us feel tliat those who have 
committed grave outward transgressions, into which 
we have not fallen because the motives to them were 
not present with us, or because God's grace kept us 
hedged round by influences which resisted them, may 
nevertheless, have had hearts which answered more to 
God's lieart, which entered far more into the grief and 
the joy of His Spirit than ours ever did ! 

* * 
The worker is, emj)liatically, not a bustler: he can- 
not be one. To fulfil his cliaracter, he must go on 
8tea«lily, from step to step: tiiere must be no hurry, 
and no intermission. . . . He can, according to 
Bacon's grand aphorism, but bring two things togetlier, 
or separate tiiem: tlie rest nature transacts in secret. 
The fever of tlie misceUaneous man, of the man who 
hopes to prevail by his multitude of words, is altogether 
foreign from liim. Just so far as he is a producer, lie is 
silent and calm. 

. Learning has no necessary connexion with 
J^eisure. But it has the most intimate connexion witli 
Hest. Tliere cannot be two words which represent 



LIFE. 15 

more different thoughts than these two : there cannot 
be anything more perilous than the confusion of them 
. . - . We see a number of men in the Universities, 
a number of men in London, with a prodigious weight 
of Leisure, but they are certain to be the most restless 
people we can encounter. 

* # 
A dull mechanical temjDer of mind, obedience to mere 

custom, impulses communicated from without, not from 
a- sjiirit within, a will recognizing no higher law than 
the opinion of men, — this is that turning away from 
God, that implicit denial of His presence, which makes 
it a most needful thing that the call should go forth 
from some human lips, and be echoed by unwonted nat- 
ural calamities, and be received as coming straiglit from 
the mouth of tlie Lord, "Repent and be converted." 
. . . The capacity for manly effort becomes feebler 
and feebler. A lion is always in the path to every duty. 
It is not the inner life, the Kingdom of Heaven only, 
which is forgotten and disbelieved in ; the spade and 
the plough lie idle ; it is supposed that thorns and 
thistles are meant to possess the ground, and that man 
is not meant to remove them. 

No doubt every man is to prepare himself, in what- 
ever he undertakes, for the probability of disappointment 
and ridicule ; that is part of his regular cost and outlay, 



16 FAITH AND ACTION. 

which he is most improvident if he does not count be- 
forehand and consider whether there is anything to set 
off on the other side. But no men have a right to 
begin a work which they do not think has a principle 
in it that may live and bear fruit after the)^ are dead 
and forgotten. 



to" 






We know not when the final day of decision is to be. 
But there is some day of decision in every age, some 
great battle of truth and falsehood, of righteousness and 
injustice, of love and self-will, in which we must one 
and all take part. There is a power of destruction at 
work in every society, in every heart. Do not fancy 
that you are less in danger from it than your forefathers 
were. It is nearest to you when you are least aware 
of its approaches, when you are least on your watch 
against it, A day may be very near at hand when the 
question will be forced upon everyone, and when every- 
one must give the answer to it " Art thou on the side 
of self-willed power, or of righteousness?" 






The great problem of all, then, is how to make men 
know that they are persons, and therefore that freedom 
and order are their necessary and rightful inheritance. 
There may be various ways of solving this problem. 
One of them may be by teaching household economy : 
one of them may be, by teaching what many call an 



LIFE. 17 

accomplishment, a refinement. I do not care what in- 
fluence you bring to bear upon the man, provided it 
does its work — provided it arouses him to be a man. 
Common things or uncommon, fine arts or coarse arts, 
which promote that object, are all precious. 

The mistakes of men are not treated by the Divine 
teacher according to the rule of the great human teacher, 
that a stick which has an inclination to bend one way, 
must be bent the other. . . . He admits that eter- 
nal life is to be obtained by Sacrifice, and only shows 
them how the selfishness of their minds is really making 
Sacrifice, in any true sense of the word, impossible. 

. . . In general, people of all ages wish to b§ 
roused out of torpor. The stimulus may be of a kind 
which tends to produce great torpor afterwards ; but 
the demand for it is a practical confession that torpor 
is wholly unsuitable -to our state, that it is quite intoler- 
able. Do not suppose that men, who are working all 
day for their bread, are in this respect different from 
their fellow-creatures. The gin ])alaces may lead at 
last to stupor and oblivion, but their first temptation is 
excitement. Every penny theatre promises the same 
reward; no ease for faculties that have been over- 
stretched, but a temporary awakening to faculties that 
have been benumbed. 



18 FAITH AND ACTION. 



* 
* * 



We think a man knows himself when he discovers all 
the grovelling tendencies which there are in himself, 
and reconciles himself to them. Assuredly it is through 
the keen sense of evil within them that most men are 
educated to wisdom. But that is because the sense of 
evil contains im|)licitly the pledge of a deliverer from 
it, because the discovery of a flesh which is not subject 
to the law of God, neitlier can be, is never made ex- 
cept by a spirit which delights in that law, and asks for 
help to fulfil it. The understanding heart of Solomon 
led him to revere as well as to suspect himself ; to re- 
vere that in himself which was God's image, to suspect 
that which was seekinij to make imacjes of its own : 
to revere that which united him to his fellow-men, to 
suspect and dread that which divided him from them. 



* * 



This age is impatient of distinctions, — of the dis- 
tinction between Right and Wrong, as well as of that 
between Truth and P\alsehood. Of all its perils that 
seems to me the greatest, that which alone gives us a 
right to tremble at any others which may be threaten- 
ing it. To watch against this temptation in ourselves, 
and in all over whom we have any charge or influence, 
is, I believe, our highest duty. In performance of it, 
I should always denounce the glorification of private 
judgment, as fatal to the belief of Truth, and to the 



LIFE. 19 

pursuit of it. We are always tending towards the 
notion that we may think what we like to think ; that 
there is no standard to which our thoughts should be 
conformed ; that they fix their own standard. 

We do not need a prophet to tell us how very soon 
the mere impression of any great calamity passes away 
from the majority of a people, when the visible signs of 
it are not present. It becomes a topic for men to talk 
of. Some may smart under the recollection of homes 
devastated, or friends perished ; but soon all seems to 
have returned to its old course. In many there is a 
strange sense of security from the notion that they have 
had their fill of startling occurrences, and tliat any rep- 
etition of them can scarcely be looked for in their day. 

The grand truth that God's forgiveness is the ground 
of man's forgiveness, and that God's forgiveness, free, 
large, absolute as it is, only reaches a man's heart when 
it subdues his unbrotherly heart and makes him forgiv- 
ing — a truth of which we are all most imperfectly con- 
scious, and which we are setting at naught continually 
by our theories, as much as we forget it in our practice. 

The more you look into the discussions of different 
parties in our time, the more you will find that, how- 
ever narrow and exclusive they may be, comprehension 



20 FAITH AND ACTION. 

is their watchword. TVe separate from our fellows on 
the plea that they are not sufficiently comprehensive ; 
we strive to break down fences which other people 
have raised, even while we are making a thicker and 
more thorny one ourselves. 

, . . If we do believe that the Son of Man is Him- 
self best able to tell us what the sitting on the throne 
of His glory and the gathering before Him of all nations 
are, let us listen to His teaching: let us think that 
when He utters the words, " Inasmuch as you did it to 
one of the least of these., ye did it to ^ne," He proclaimed 
that which is the very truth of human existence. 

. . . To us, if we hold fast this truth and try to 
live by it, that judgment at the last day will be no idle 
fiction ; not a pageant with which we shall dare to trifle, 
but a living, eternal verity, w hich it would be the loss 
of all our hopes for ourselves, or for our race, of all our 
faith in God to part with. 

The talents might be apparently unequal because the 
tasks and temptations of those to whom they were com- 
mitted were unequal. But all were adequate, all 
might be improved. . . . They were not absolute 
gifts, but gifts to be traded with. And the difference 
between one and another arises primarily from the 
neglect of this trading, ultimately from distrust in the 



LIFE. 21 

owner. . . . The principle of this parable, then, 
. . . is deep and universal. . . That with 
which we are especially concerned here, is the lesson 
concerning the evenness and righteousness of God's 
dealings, the assertion that the same joy is intended 
for all who do not distrust their divine employer, but 
are ready to work for Him and with Him in His 

spirit. 

# 

Be sure of this : till you have done trusting in your 
own sincerity, you will never be sincere. Till you 
know how much insincerity is in you, and frankly con- 
fess it, . . . you are not in a way to be sincere. 
But to have a confession set before us which brings 
this guilt to our minds ; which tells us that it has been 
the guilt of our forefathers as well as our own ; that, 
though our circumstances have changed so greatly, our 
temptations and dangers have not changed, — this is 
not to make us insincere. 

. . . I question whether we arrive at the real 
force of our Lord's words by reducing two actual 
women (Mary and Martha) into representatives of cer- 
tain qualities which ought to be united in every charac- 
ter, if it is formed in the image of Him whose inward 
delight was to do the will of His Father in Heaven 
and who went about doing good. Martha complains 



22 FAITH AND ACTION. 

of lier sister, and is rebuked, for her complaining, not 
for her diligence. The deeper moral would seem to be, 
that restlessness and bustle are not activity, that a still 
current of inward life is essential to steady patient 
work. 

The high gifts and the low were equally bestowed 
by the eternal Spirit. Prudence dwells with wisdom. 
A power of dealing with the pettiest details of life is 
just as much a divine endowment ... as the ap- 
prehension of spiritual truths. 

* 
* * 

. . . Zeal is an excellent thing if it is in a good 
cause, and if it does not spend itself in mere love to 
those who are present. But there is a zeal which is 
not at all excellent. There are those who show a great 
deal of zeal in robbing their disciples of that which is 
most precious, in order that they 77ia2/ depend upon 
them and admire them. 

To talk to us about judgments, and the preparation 
for them, and the sin of being indifferent to them, and 
the advantaije of owninc: God's hand in them — how 
little of real lielp lies in all this ! A wise teacher who 
knows that we need so much, must know tliat we need 
something more. We need to be put in the way of 
humbling our own lofty looks, of laying low our own 



LIFE. 23 

haughtiness, of exalting the Lord alone. It is not a 
habit which we find specially easy of acquisition, not 
one which comes by merely wishing that we had it, 
not one which we can afford to practise awhile and then 
discontinue. It must be w^rought into the tissue of our 
lives. 

" Whatever you do^ do all in the name of Christy 
thanking God and the Father in Him.'''' Instead of the 
self-exalting life, you have the life of men who are 
submitting themselves to a blessed power of good 
which is striving to bless them. Instead of the in- 
dividual life, you have the life of mutual instruction, 
edification, encouragement. 

If Christ is not in every man. Christians can. Chris- 
tians will, treat all as chattels, or worse than chattels, 
who do not bear their name. Very soon they will feel 
they have a right to treat men as chattels, or worse 
than chattels who do bear their name. No faith will 
be kept with heretics. . . . No faith will be kept 
with those we think ungodly, or who differ from us. 
For what have they to do with Christ ? . . . Thus 
we proceed, in our zeal for Christ, to destroy all the 
life and morality which He has brought into the world, 
and we are obliged to invent a new morality of our own 
to supply that we have lost. 



24 FAITH AND ACTION, 



* 



In a civilized country — above all, in one which 
possesses a free press — there is a certain power, 
mysterious and indefinite in its operations, but pro- 
ducing the most obvious and mighty effects, which 
we call public opinion. If this can be brought to 
bear upon the acts and proceedings of any function- 
ary, we suppose that there is as much security for 
his good behavior as can possibly be obtained. . . 
» If we think with awe of mysterious affinities, 
of some mighty principle which binds the elements 
of the universe together, why should we not wonder 
also at these moral affinities, this more subtle magnet- 
ism, which bears witness ^hat every man is connected 
by the most intimate bonds with his neighbor, and that 
no one can live independently of another? . . . 
It may easily be admitted that a reflection of this kind 
is suggested when we meditate upon public opinion, — 
the insignificance of the agents by which it works, and 
the greatness of its results for good or for evil. But 
I apprehend no one is able to learn this lesson from 
it . . . till he has risen in some measure above it ; 
. . . any more than he can estimate the sublimity 
of a storm, while he is trembling lest it should in a mo- 
ment destroy him, and all that are dear to him, or than 
he can think of the hallowed associations which a 
churchyard at night-time might call up, while he is 



LIFE. 25 

dreading lest he should be pursued by some pale spectre. 
If we could learn the secret of overcoming this power, 
of acting as if we were indeed responsible to some other 
and more righteous one ; if that conviction could be as 
present to us as the thought of judgment which our 
fellow-creatures pass upon us ; if our whole lives were 
moulded by the one belief as much as they are moulded 
by the other, we should be able to understand what the 
world's judgment can do for us as well as what it can- 
not do ; the very same principle which keeps us from 
obeying it would keep us from despising it; . . . 
we should have courage to say ..." Whether it 
be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more 
than unto God, judge ye." 

Never for a moment let us try to separate, or dream 
that we can separate, our individual life from our na- 
tional. Our vocation is the same in the most private 
occupations, and when we are fulfilling what are called 
our duties as citizens. Every duty is a civic duty. 
We are fighting in our closets for our nation, if we are 
fighting truly for ourselves ; our soldiers should go out 
to open battle against the foes of freedom and order 
with the same recollections, with the same sense of self- 
devotion as that which we would cultivate at home. 
Commonly they shame us ; there is more simple sur- 
render, more casting away of themselves, not for fame 



26 FAITH AND ACTION. 

or glory, but simply because it is their calling, their 
plain duty, than we can pretend to. . . . We 
should try to learn from them this indifference to effect 
and its consequences; we should try to teach them 
what its true basis is, how it is laid deep in God's own 
claim that we should be like Him — that we should be 
witnesses for Him — that we should do His work. 
When once we understand that, self-sacrifice can never 
be an ambitious thing. ... It will be regarded as 

the true ground of all action. 

* 

Sacrifice may be the expression of the two most con- 
trary feelings and states of mind — the most contrary, 
and yet lying so close to each other in every man that 
only the eye of God can distinguish them, till they dis- 
tinguish themselves by the acts which they generate. 
Sacrifice may import the confession of a child, who 
feels that lie has nothing and is a mere receiver. It 
may import the sense in a man that he lias something 
to offer which His ]\Iaker ought to accept. It may 
import the trust of a cliild depending on One from 
whom it believes all good comes, aware that what is not 
good is its own. It may import the hope of a man — 
an uncertain sullen hope — that he may persuade the 
power he sui)poses is ruling, to give him some benefit, 
to avert from him some danger. It may be an act of 
simple giving up, or surrender ; it may be an act of 



LIFE, 27 

barter, — a bargain to relinquish a less good on the 

chance of obtaining a greater. 

* 

"We know that restlessness has been and is the great 
curse of ourselves, and of all human creatures. We 
know that we distrust God through love of visible 
things — through superstition. , . . And the con- 
sequence has always been, must always be, the same. 
Growing restlessness, willingness to try all methods ; 
new failures leading to new experiments ; the impostor 
who promises help to-day succeeding the impostor who 
left us more miserable than he found us yesterday — 
at last an incapacity of understanding how there can 
be any blessing left for us — is not this what we have 
felt ? . . . Are not the words " They cannot enter 
into rest," written deep upon the struggles, the confes- 
sions even the seeming triumphs of multitudes? But 
is there nothing better for us than this dark prospect ? 
Is the Love of God baffled by the unbelief of man ? 
. . . Not so. 

That obedience should be the means of rectifvingr 
the disorders of the universe, of bringing back the 
state of things which self-will has broken and disturbed, 
of re-establishing the kingdom and righteousness of 
God, of renewing and subduing the hearts of hu- 
man beings, this is what we should with wonder and 



28 FAITH AND ACTION. 

trembling expect ; this is what corresponds so blessedly, 
so perfectly, to the deepest prophecies in the spirit of 
mankind ; this is the very Gospel which has brought 
light into the midst of our darkness, life into the midst 
of our death. But we must not change and invert 
God's order to make it square with our condition ; if we 
do, it will not meet the necessities of that condition. 
We must not start from the assumption of discord and 
derangement, however natural to creatures that are 
conscious of discord and derangement such a course 
may be ; we must begin with harmony and peace, and 
so understand why they have been broken, how they 
have prevailed and shall prevail. 

We confess that we cannot live without a daily re- 
newal of life. We confess that we cannot separate our 
life from the life of our kind. Consider earnestly 
what is involved in that acknowledgment. See whether 
it does not mean that every faculty of sense, feeling, 
perception, is awakened in us by an impulse from above ; 
see whether every such faculty does not remind us that 
we must go out of ourselves if we w^ould be truly our- 
selves. To be ahrays going out of ourselves, always in 
fellow^ship with the Source of all Good and Truth, aU 
ways communicating what we receive from it to those 
about us, this is the highest perfection we cnn dream 
of; this is the life of Christ; this must be the life of 



LIFE. 29 

those spirits who have fought the fight, and finished 
their earthly course. To be receiving nothing, to be 
communicating nothing, to be altogether shut up in self, 
this is that Excommunication which we can hardly 
dream of ; this must be the condition of devils. 

This is Peace, — the peace depending on One who is 
worthy of our dependence, the peace of not seeking 
that from outward things wliich they cannot give, the 
peace of not seeking that from our own nature which 
is not in it. The Peace is there, in our hearts, but it 
is there while the heart is seeking its delight in another, 
while it is forgetting itself. When it finds its object, 
it is at peace ; it cannot be till then. . . . The 
world teaches us to claim each thing as our own. It 
says nothing is ours till we can secure it against other 
men. We hold this peace by the opposite tenure : we 
have it only while we care to distribute it, while we 
seek that every one should share it with us. 






Far off as this peace may seem to be from us, it is 
I'eally nigh at hand to every one of us. We must 
think we pursue it hither and thither, and it seems 
always in advance of us, — we do not come \x.]) with it. 
But that which we are pursuing is only a shadow ; the 
substance from which it is cast is within. The heart 
cannot find it abroad ; at home the treasure is laid 



30 FAITH AND ACTION. 

up, though it may be in a chamber we have never 

visited. 

* 

Upon our thoughts of God it will depend, in one 
time or another, whether we rise higher, or sink lower 
as societies and as individuals. The civility or intelli- 
gence of a people may seem to have grown up, and to 
be growing, under the influence of a multitude of ad- 
ventitious circumstances. But, if you search well, you 
will find that whatever in it is not false, whatev(*r has 
not the sentence of speedy death written upon it, has 
had a deeper and more mysterious origin. It has been 
the fruit of struggles, carried on in solitary chambers 
by men whom the world has not known, or has de- 
Bi)ised ; struggles which were to decide what power they 
were meant to obey, and to what power they would 
yield themselves ; struggles to know the name of Ilim 
who was wrestling with them. 

TVe find ourselves in a strange medley of circum- 
stances. Some of them we call petty, some grand. Some 
seem to start out of the present hour; some have on 
them the stamp and dust of ages. We try to dispose 
them and manage them. The old legend of St. Peter 
is repeated in our experience. He asked leave to 
govern the world for a day. He spent that day in 



LIFE. 31 



prfrsuing a single goat over the hills, and had to lament 
in the evenino; that it was too wild for bis control. 



* 



What wild pride and recklessness there is in the 
sense of health ! How miserably are those deceived 
who fancy that a sick-bed is in itself a cure for natu- 
ral infirmities, and not an aggravation of them and an ex- 
cuse for them ! What selfishness there is in possession, 
but oh ! how it turns inward, how gnawing it becomes 
in the hour of depiivation and loss. Various gifts and 
endowments we speak of as full of danger, and yet the 
man in the Gospel hid his talent in the earth, because 
he had only one. The physician, lawyer, divine, may 
each suspect that the other has some especial means of 
usefulness, some exemption from evils which he has 
felt ; but the heart knows its own bitterness : not one 
of them is wrong in saying that his position is full of 
snares; and that what seem to the on-looker securities, 
are really dangers. 

In the region where there is the greatest awe, there 
is also the greatest courage ; he who trembles most, 
ventures most ; it is on the dry cold level of earth that 
we walk as if on ice, sliding back as many steps as we 
advance ; now proclaiming some hardy sentiment, tak- 
ing care the next moment to make it innocent of meau- 
iuG^. 



32 FAITH AND ACTION. 

Courasje is not natural to us : it does not come througfh 
fortune or the accident of being born in a certain local- 
ity, or because we have the blessinoj of beinoj descended 
from brave men. A thousand motives tempt us to cow- 
ardice in little things ; we are afraid to speak the truth 
just as it is ; we are afraid to tell our friends when we 
know that they are wrong; we are afraid to assert wliat 
we know to be riglit. We court public opinion, private 
opinion. . . . We require more than ever the 
help of the old Hebrew seer. We want him to ring in 
our ears continually " Thou shalt not he aifrir/Jited at 
tJif-m^ for the Lord tJnj God is among you^ a mighty 
God^ and a terrible.'''' But we shall only hear and un- 
derstancl that voice if we hear also the prayer of the 
Apostle, and join in it: '■'■ J'^or this cause T hoyi my 
knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christy that He 
icill grant you to he strengthened hy might with His 
iSpirit in the inner man.'''' That Spirit is the true 
source of the courage, which is gentle, because it is stern 
and unbending; able to endure all things because it is 
intolerant of evil ; essentially human, because it is es- 
sentially divine. 

It may sound strange to say so, but it is true : tliose 
who love the world, those who surrender themselves to 
it, never understand it, never in the best sense enjoy 



LIFE. 33 

it; they are too much on the level of it — yes, too 
much below the level of it, — for they look up to it, they 
depend upon it, — to be capable of contemplating it, 
and of appreciating what is most exquisite in it. . . 
. The sensualist does not know what the delights of 
sense are ; he is out of temjjer when he is denied tlieni : 
he is out of temper when he possesses them : . . . 
The' lover of praise and reputation is continually 
baulked of the flattery that has become necessary to 
him. He detects something disagreeable in that which 
is most highly flavored ; a rough word is a torment to 
him. 

There is abundance of goodnatured charity afloat 
in the world, charity for all sorts of people, all forms of 
distress. But this is the ornamental part of our ex- 
istence, the capital or fretwork of the building. The 
substantial part, the pillars of it, we seem to think are 
our rights^ rights to position, property, rank, the hom- 
age of others, their gratitude. If these are withheld — 
the hundred pence which each man has a claim upon 
from his fellow — with what indignation do we repulse 
the claims which we had acknowledged that mercy and 
charity have upon us ! 

We have only fairly to look our evils in the face, 
concealing none of them from ourselves, excusing none 



34 FAITH AND ACTION. 

of them to each other, confessing them all to God. We 
have but to understand and remember continually the 
utter inefficiency of all physical appliances, if the inner 
strength and heart are absent. AYe have but to claim ' 
our share in all the sins of our country, not thrusting 
them ujion other men, but owning that they belong to 
our evil nature, and how little we have fought against 
them. We have but to ask God to take away our pride 
and self-conceit, that we may be fit to stand in the CA^il 
day, and having done all, to stand. 

It is far easier to feel kindly, to act khidly towards 
those with whom we are seldom brouglit in contact, 
whose tempers and prejudices do not rub against ours, 
whose interests do not clash with ours, than to keep up 
an habitual, steady, self-sacrificing love towards those 
whose weaknesses and faults are always forcing them- 
selves upon us, and are stirring up our own. A man 
may pass good muster as a philanthropist who makes 
but a poor master to his servants, or father to his 
cliildren. 

The older one grows the more, I think, one under- 
stands the worth of that kind of communion which 
there is between a motlier and her son : how much 
other intercourse has grown out of that, and wants 
something which belongs to it. But it can never cease. 



LIFE, 35 

. . . I am sure of that. . . . The inward influ- 
ences and illuminations which come to us through those 
who have loved us are deeper than any that we can 
realize : they penetrate all our life, and assure us that 
there must be a Fountain of Life and Love from which 
they and we are continually receiving strength to bear 
and to hope. 



IL 

MEN. 

. . . The human agency is a very blessed part of 
( GocVs) economy : still, the best anyone of us can do is 
to teach his brother how he may do without him, and 
yet not cease to care for him. 

Have you found that the man w^ho is in the greatest 
hurry to tell you all tliat he thinks about all possible 
thins^s is the friend that is best worth havinor? Ilnve 
you found that the one who talked most about himself 
and his own doings is the most worth knowing? . . 
Do not you say sometimes in Shakespeare's 
own words, or rather in Falstaffs, "I do see to the bot- 
tom of this same Justice Shallow : he has told me all 
that he has to tell. There is no reserve in him, nothing 
that is worth searching after." On the other hand, 
have you not met with some men who very rarely spoke 
about their own impressions and thoughts, who seldom 
laid down the law, and yet who, you were sure, had a 
fund of wisdom within, and who made you partakers of 
it bv the lisjht which thev threw on the earth in which 
they were dwelling, especially by the kindly humorous 

36 



MEN. 37 

pathetic way in which they interested you about your 
fellow-men, and made you acquainted with them? 

. . . A wise man does not talk about himself. Pie 
makes us honor him and love him, because we feel that 
that is not the thing he is chiefly occupied about. He 
does not want to make us worship him : if he could he 
would draw us away from all false worship of every 
kind. 

There are some who would give us only the husks of 
truths in systems : there are others who would give the 
price of truths in feelings and symj^athies. 

* 

Christ chose the Apostles from no partial affection, 
but as witnesses of His Truth and Love to all mankind, 
and the one who was nearest to Him and received most 
of His love into his heart was the one whom He called 
to show forth most fully the love with which He loved 
the universe in giving Himself for it. 

The one thought in St. Paul's mind with which all 
that he says about redemption, forgiveness of trans- 
gression and every other subject is connected, is that 
the blessing of the creature is to have the knowledge 
of God, and therefore that the great mercy for which 
we have to thank Him is that He has been revealin?: 



38 FAITH AND ACTION. 

Himself. ... If the teachers of Christianity 
would but keep this one thought before themselves and 
set it before others, what a change it would make in all 
our notions and feelings and conduct ! 






Luther reverenced St. Paul, not in the least that he 
echoed any opinion which Luther had brought to the 
study of him. It Mas that he had delivered Luther 
from a host of opinions, which had been anguish to his 
soul, showing him that there was a direct access for 
him to a God of riixhteousness and truth. 



* 



There are comparatively few statements respecting 
St. John in the Gos]>els ; but everyone which we have, 
shows that meekness and tenderness were 7iotihe quali- 
ties which he first learned to appreciate in his Lord, 
and that he was not hindered by any sense of these 
from desiring to renew the severities of the olden time. 
. . . Unless the Scripture deceives us altogether? 
St. John had need of hard inward struggles to become 
a gentle, gracious, loving man. That soft feminine 
countenance, — unmarked by a single furrow — which 
painters have chosen to ascribe to him, can never 
have been his actually, is not his ideally. The man 
who would have called fire from heaven upon the 
Samaritans, the man who was sure he could endure 
Christ's baptism of fire, had no soft features, no senti- 



MEN. 89 

mental expression. If he was the apostle of love, it 
was love in a different sense from this. " £lessed is he 
that overcometh " are the words which rang again and 
again in his ears, when he saw the vision of his glorified 
Master. He had been taught, through the bitterest 
inward strife, what such words meant. 

Is Israel said to be a holy nation, a peculiar people, 
a race of kings and priests to God, while yet Israelites 
are described by such ignominious names, and those 
names vindicated by such ignominious facts ? What is 
this but the truth which we have been learninoj from 
the besjinninoj of the Old Testament ? That God created 
men to be members of a kind, portions of a Society ; 
that as a kind, a Society, He created them to be in 
His own image : but that the first man, and each man 
since, has been trying to thwart this purpose, to set 
himself up as a creature, separate from his kind, sepa- 
rate from God ; and that in spite of this inclination, 
God has gone on continually asserting His original pur- 
pose and order, gradually unfolding it to men, and by 
wonderful processes of education leading them to un- 
derstand it and submit to it ? 

How then was Balaam a false prophet ? No Jew or 
Christian says that he was a false prophet because the 
predictions which he uttered came to nought. . . . 



40 . FAITH AND ACTION. 

That test of truth, if it were enough, the prophet 
Balaam could well endure. But it is 7iot enough to 
satisfy the demands of Scripture or of our consciences. 
A man may be false, though all his words are true, 
though he has gifts and endowments of the highest 
order, though those gifts and endowments proceed, as 
all proceeds, from God, though he refers them to Him 
and seems to hold them as His vassal. 

In whatever form self exaltation comes into the heart 
of man — in the form of craving for })opularity, of in- 
tellectual pride, of spiritual pride, in the desire for do- 
minion over others, in the secret triumph of our own 
superiority — the Balaam sin is working underground. 
. . . Let our trust be in God and not in ourselves 
to deliver us from this root of bitterness. 

Is it not possible, after all, that a man may be more 
glorious than a hero? that to be on a level with all 
and to feel that the lowliest is the highest may be bet- 
ter than to vaunt up some great champions and repre- 
sentatives, who make us think even more higly of our- 
selves than of them ? 

Johnson said of Burke that, if you met him under a 
gateway in a shower of rain, you must perceive that he 
was a remarkable man. I do not think that we can 



MEN. 41 

take up the most insignificant fragment of the most i:.- 
significant speech or pamphlet he ever put forth, with- 
out arrivino; at the same conviction. 

Mr. Thackeray, the most competent person possible 
for such a task, has introduced Addison and Steele 
among the humorists of England, and has shown very 
clearly how the humor of one differed from that of 
the other, and how unlike both were to Dean Swift, who 
is the best and most perfect specimen of ill-humor — 
that is to say, of a man of the keenest intellect and 
the most exquisite clearness of expression, who is utterly 
out of sorts with the world and with himself. Addison 
is on good terms with both. . . . He does not 
go very far down into the hearts of people : he never 
discovers any of the deeper necessities which there are 
in human beings. But everything that is upon the 
surface of their lives, and all the little cross currents 
which difiturb them, no one sees so accurately, or de- 
scribes so gracefully. 

Goethe seems to me the most perfect specimen of a 
genus of which I do not desire to see the multiplication, 
but which in itself is very valuable. The age of mere 
self-culture is over, but we must not lose the lessons it 
taught. 



42 FAITH AND ACTION, 

* * 
I can never forget one sentence of Mr. Buckle, which 

1 confess I prize above all his statistics and all his 
theories on civilization. He said that no mere argu- 
ments for Immortality had ever had much weight with 
him, but that, when he remembered his mother, he 
could not disbelieve in it. Such a testimony from a 
man who so greatly exalted the Intellect, who in words, 
at least, treated Morality as poor in comparison with it, 
seems to me of unspeakable worth. 

Men's unfaithfulness in little things corresponds to 
their unfaithfulness in fjreat. 



* 
* * 



The temptation of Savonarola and of every man pos- 
sessing remarkable endowments and feeling certain of 
the purpose to which he should devote them, is to 
think of himself as under some economy different from 
that of other men. Though in his moments of highest 
inspiration ^le claims them all as fellow heirs with him, 
— though the very secret of his power lies in his sym- 
pathy, yet he is continually apt to fancy (and how fear- 
fully does the adoration of crowds increase and perpet- 
uate the delusion !) that he is an altogether different 
being from those who hang upon his lips. Hence come 
the pretensions, and sometimes the dishonorable efforts 
to support them, which have defiled the lives of men 



MEN. 43 



essentially brave and true, and have caused them their 
greatest sorrows and humiliations. 






It does not signify one jot whether God satisfies our 
notion of what an inspired man ought to be. It does 
not signify a jot whether we have a notion on that sub- 
ject or not, further than this, that if it interferes with 
our learning what is good for us to learn — and recog- 
nizinof truth where we meet with it, and beinsc true 
ourselves — the sooner we part with it the better. De- 
pend upon it, the inspiration of these men was not 
something which was imparted to them that . . . 
they might be more separate from us. It was given to 
them to bind them more closely to those among whom 
tliey dwelt. ... It was given to them tliat they 
might be helpers to all men in all times to come, who 
must be taught of God, yes, and be inspired by God, if 
they are to do any true act or utter any true word. It 
was given them that they might teach men in all ages 
to come, not to think themselves safe because they liave 
a calling from God and gifts from God, but to under- 
stand that the greatest perils attach themselves to that 
honor, that they are only safe in holding it when they 
refer it all to God, and use it wholly for their brethren. 






Just as St. Paul and the Galatians had this flesh and 
this Spirit fighting in them, so have you and I. Just 



44 FAITH AND ACTION. 

as the flesh was drawing them down to low vile things, 
to those things that ruin the body and soul and set us 
at war with each other, so it is with you and me. We 
are not different, so far, from other men. Christians 
have not a whit better natures than Jews or heathen . 
. . oftentimes Jews and heathen do good things which 
should make us ashamed. 

You cannot help reverencing the man who gives him- 
self for his family, his country, his conviction. You 
cannot help despising the man who gives up his family, 
his country, his convictions, to save himself. You are 
sure the one attains the blessings which he seems to 
aban<lon, that the other abandons the blessings which 
he seems to attain. Alas, alas ! it has been supposed 
that, in our religious life the doctrine is reversed. There, 

it is said, we are to be self-seekers. 

* 

I find it a good rule when I am contemplating a per- 
son from whom I want to learn, always to look out for 
his strencrth, beina: confident that the weakness will dis- 
cover itself, so far as it is good for me to be aware of it, 
without seekinor for it. 



o 



* 



An unknown monk, whose very name is disputed, 
though he is called Thomas a Kempis, writing in un- 
couth Latin and expressing more than an indifference 



MEN. 45 

for the scholasticism of his time, has had an influence 
deeper and more widely-spread than that of the most 
learned men, only because he spoke of an unseen 
Teacher who conversed with the consciences of men 
and to whom they might turn in their troubles and 
their ignorance. The lessons of this monk did not 
cease to be recoo-nized when another monk of firmer 
and clearer purpose {Martin JJuther) spoke to the Con- 
sciences of his contemporaries of One who could deliver 
them from the burthens which doctors and Systemati- 
sers had laid upon them. 

Let none say — that in Jacob's case or any other — 
the sin consists in pursuing a glorious and righteous end 
by unrighteous means. If the true end were clearly 
before the inward eye, the way to it would be clear 
also. It is because our eye is not single ; because there 
are perplexed, contradictory images floating before it — 
Self mixing with God — ... that we prefer an ir- 
reojular and tauGfled course to a straiixht one. If the 
disciples of Loyola had fully settled in their minds 
what end God had set before them as the prize of their 
high calling, there would have been no crooked acts in 
their policy. 

« * 

The Apostles thought that they could suffer for 
Christ because they loved Him. They were right in 



46 FAITH AND ACTION. 

believing that love is the ground of all action and of all 
suffering, but they were utterly wrong in supposing 
that their own love could be the ground of either. If 
this love were in any degree an effort of their own, if 
it were not God's love working in them, it would prove, 
as He had warned Peter that it would, the w^eakest of 
all thin us. 






Christ calls them no longer servants, but friends, be- 
cause servants only know what they are to do, without 
knowing why they are to do it ; whereas He has told 
them the very secret of His Father's mind. . . . 
It is not that the friend is less under authority than the 
servant. It is not that the one does what he is bidden, 
and the other may do what he likes. It is that the 
friend enters into the very nature of the command — 
that it is a command wliich is addressed to his will, 
and which moulds his will to its own likeness. 






Years of hard adversity and suffering do not of them- 
selves fit a man to reign ; they may be worse than 
wasted upon him : he may come out of them more reck- 
less and heartless, more ignorant of any government 
exercised over himself, less conscious of any responsi- 
bility for the government which he exercises over 
others, than he went into them. For our own individ- 
ual benefit, as well as for the sake of nations we should 



MEN. 41 

lay this doctrine, hard though it be, to heart. Adver- 
sity is, in itself, as little gracious as prosperity. Moral 
death may be the fruit of one as much as of the other. 
It was otherwise with David, not because adversity had 
any especial influence over him, which it has not over 
us, but because he accepted it as God's punishment and 
medicine, because he believed that God would do the 
good for him which adversity could not do. 

It has been the belief of all earnest men of all schools 
that the sop given to Judas was a last love-token, and 
that the entrance of Satan into him after it had been 
received, expresses that last defiance of love, that utter 
abandonment to the spirit of selfishness, w^hich precedes 
the commission of the greatest conceivable crime. 

* 

The kingly lesson and the human lesson are nowhere 
more intimately united than in the life of David. That 
which enabled David, crushed and broken, to be more 
than ever the man after God's own heart, to see more 
than ever into the depths of wisdom and love in that 
heart, was also that which fitted him to be a ruler, by 
understanding the only condition on which it is possible 
for a man to exercise real dominion over others, viz., 
when he gives up himself, that they may know God, 
and not him, to be their sovereign. 



48 FAITH AND ACTION. 



* 



^ It is in the quiet times that a man is tested. Then 
we find out not only what he can do, but what he is ; 
whether his zeal for riijhteousness means that he will 
obey it : wliether his hatred for what is false implies an 
adherence to the true. 






There are moments ... in the mind of the dullest, 
most prosaic man when unknown springs seem to be 
opened in him, when either some new and powerful af- 
fection, or quite as often the sense of a vocation, fills 
him with tlioughts and causes him to utter words 
which are quite alien from his ordinary habits and yet 
which you are sure he cannot have been tauglit by any 
other person — they have in tliem such a jiledge and 
savor of originality. You say, involuntarily, " He 
seemed for the moment quite inspired, he became an- 
other man." Are you not also half inclined to say, 
"Now for tlie first time the man has come forth? 
Hitherto a cold barren nature or a formal education, 
has choked up the life that was in him : now it is burst- 
ing through artificial dams, through mud barriers. 
Now we can see what is in him." 






I agree with Carlyle that Cromwell on the whole un- 
derstood his time better than all who lived in it : that 
he discovered the godly idea which was underneath 



MEN. 49 

tlie reverence for laws and charters in the Parliament, 
and that which was underneath the monarchical idola- 
try in the Cavaliers : that he swept away the pedantries 
of both and brought out the truth of God's government 
in its nakedness. This is honor euougii for any man, 
and all praise to Carlyle for assigning it to its rightful 
owner. 

I am glad you have seen Gladstone and have been 
able to judge a little of what his face indicates. It is 
a very expressive one : hard worked, as you say, and 
not perhaps specially happy ; more indicative of strug- 
gle than of victory, though not without promise of that. 
I admire him for his patient attention to details, and for 
the pains which he takes to secure himself from being 
absorbed in them by entering into large and generous 
studies. 

Bacon reverenced the study of Nature more than he 
did the study of Man ; and no wonder! For he found 
out what a beautiful order there was in Nature ; and, 
though I believe he looked for an order in human af- 
fairs too, and sometimes discerned and always wished 
for it, yet there is no denying that he had a keen eye 
for the disorders and wrong-doings of his fellow-men, 
and that he rather reconciled himself to them than 
sought to remedy them. 



50 FAITH AND ACTION. 

We owe Jeremy Taylor, the Prince of Royalists and 
Episcopalians, Milton, the grandest of the Puritans and 
Republicans, to the faith which the Civil Wars en- 
kindled in both, to the sufferings which both endured. 
And the man who was better known to the people of 
England than either of these, the man who has ex- 
pressed the deepest anguish and the highest hopes, 
John Bunyan, owes the power which he has exercised, 
first, no doubt, to the reality of his own inward strug- 
gles, but much, also, to the prison at Bedford in which 

he dreamed his true dream. 

* 

The age of Elizabeth is the glorious age of our lit- 
erature only because it is the great working age of the 
nation ; one in which all thought was connected with 
actual business, and was used for the interpretation of 
it. In action our writers on Government and Polity 
were formed. You would expect to find Hooker, per- 
haps, cultivating his faculties and acquiring his calm 
wisdom in some monarchical retreat. You find him 
rocking his child's cradle, shearing sheep, listening to 
the objugations of a very troublesome helpmate. Our 
noble Spenser will at least dwell chiefly in a fantastic 
world. On the contrary, his fairyland is his common 
native land. . . Ilis supposed allegory mixes with 
all common daily transactions. It was in that battle 



MEN. 51 



for life and death in which every one of us is engaged 
that his Sir Guyons and Artegalls and Britomarts and 
Arthurs proved their swords and won their laurels. 






A few years ago it might have been thought that 
Shakespeare ought to have no place in a Lecture on 
Learning. We should have been told that he was the 
great type instance of the force of original genius with- 
out learning. I do not anticipate any such objection 
now. I think all are agreed that historical learning, 
biographical learning, humane learning, in the largest 
sense of the word, belonged to him, and that it did not 
drop upon him from the clouds ; that he acquired it ; 
that his genius enabled him to win it and use it, but 
was not in the least a substitute for it. Most assuredly 
he did not obtain it in leisure, or in any school that ex- 
empted him from intercourse with the coarsest persons 
and occupations. If he had merely read the old chroni- 
cles of England, he might have commented on them, 
much as others have commented on him. But he used 
them to interpret the actual world in which he lived, 
and so both pages became illuminated. 

When I speak of Robert Burns, it is not with the in- 
tention of descanting on his powers, far less of demand- 
ing any new wonder for them. How good it would 
have been for him and his contemporaries if they had 



52 FAITH AND ACTION. 

wondered less, if it had seemed to them nothing at all 
surprising that an Ayrshire peasant should think more 
freely and speak more nobly than those who had been 
trained amidst the forms of artificial life, who were in 
less close intercourse with that which is native and 
homely ! For then they would have sought less to re- 
move him out of his sphere into theirs ; they would 
have wished more to profit by his strength, than that 
he should be a sharer in their weakness. 






Take away from a man all the injurious influence 
that it is possible to take away; not because circum- 
stances are his rightful masters, but because these in- 
fluences lead him to think that they are, and to act as 
if they were. Take them away that he may know what 
has robbed him of his freedom, whose yoke needs to be 
broken if he is not always to be a slave. And since the 
man soon discovers, — since his worship of circum- 
stances is itself an acknowledgment of the discovery 

that the tyranny which is over hirn is a tyranny over 
his whole race, we shall never give him any clearness 
of mind or any hope unless we can tell him that tlie 
Spirit of Selfishness is the common enemy, and that he 
has been overcome. 



* 



A man may feel that he is called to a work lonrr be- 
fore the moment arrives when he can perform it, long 



MEN. 53 

before the outward event occurs, which corresponds to 
the inward impulse and explains its full meaning. 
Such intervals, no doubt, make great demands upon the 
faith and patience of him who is appointed to pass 
through them. There is the strongest temptation to 
doubt whether that which seemed to give a law and 
purpose to his life was not itself a dream. There is a 
temptation to create the occasion for speaking or acting 
before it arises. But the delay is an education which 
is profitable in proportion as the original inspiration 
and conviction are kept alive. 

Micah does not make the falsehood of the prophet 
consist in this, that he pretended to be taught when he 
had no Divine Teacher, but that he abused the divine 
teaching to vile mercenary ends, that, being conscious 
of a spiritual power and illumination, he acted as if his 
words were his own, and he might sell them to the ser- 
vice of a great man or a mob. The sacredness of words 
almost overwhelms the mind of the prophet ; he knows 
them to be powers greater than all which the mightiest 
animals can put forth, greater than the most wonderful 
energies of nature. And these, even these, the false 
prophet thinks he may play with, not considering that 
he is poisoning the very source of a nation's life, that 
he is leading men to believe in a Spirit of lies, instead 
of a God of truth. 



54 FAITH AND ACTION. 



* 
* # 



Everything is received according to the character 
and capacity of the receiver. How should a set of 
quarrelsome and factious men know anything about the 
unity of God ? 






The man of profoundest science is, and must be, a 
little child ; he must cease to see himself reflected in 
the things about him, he must be content to see every- 
thing as it is revealed by its own light, not as it is 
measured and colored by his light. Of such, then, 
must be the Kingdom of Heaven : only those who can 
take everything as a gift, who think of the object, not 
of their own sight or faith, of Him who works in them, 
not of their own acts, can be the real brethern and fel- 
low-citizens of Him who glorified not Himself, but His 
Father who sent Him. 






Every man has the capacity of righteousness, the 
capacity of evil. Let him be ever so righteous, he 
must become evil the moment he ceases to trust in God 
and bcijins to trust in himself. Let him be ever so 
evil, he must become righteous the moment he begins 
to trust in God and ceases to trust in himself. 






"Give up the thing which thou lovest better than 
God, and thou wilt know what He is ; thou wilt have 



MEW. 55 

treasure in heaven." Here was the test. He had 
never known before what his heaven was : now he 
found it out. The life he was seeking was the earthly 
life, though he called it eternal life. . . . It is not 
the Evangelist's business to give us the issue of the story. 
One cheering hint they do give us, upon which we may 
build plausible conclusions respecting the history of the 
young man. He went away sad. He had learnt to 
know himself as he had never known himself before, to 
have a discontent with himself which he had till then 
never experienced. All good may have come out of 
that sadness. 

As some evil tendency or temper, which exists in a 
man forces itself on his notice, or is forced upon him 
by the criticisms and admonitions of others, he refers 
it to some of the circumstances by which he is hemmed 
in. Has he not a right to do so ? Can he not prove 
his case ? That effeminate slothful disposition — can- 
not he explain to himself clearly what early indulgence, 
what ill-health, what inherited morbidness begot it in 
him? . . . That loss of truth in words and deeds, 
cannot he trace it up to frauds practiced on him in the 
nursery ? . . . But for riches, would he have been 
so hard and indifferent to otliers ? But for poverty 
and successive disappointments, would he have been 
so sour and envious ? In this way we reason about our- 



56 FAITH AND ACTION. 

selves; we deliberately assign an origin to the evil 
within us; can we refuse the advantage of the same 
plea to our fellows? Do we not blush when we tell 
any man, "You ought to have been so different." 
Have not a tliousand influences that we know acted 
upon him for evil, which have not acted upon us? 
May there not have been tens of thousands which we 
do not know ? 

* 

There is no case in all our Lord's discourses, in which 
the recompense which he proposes to man, docs not 
consist mainly in the deliverance from the selfishness 
which is his great torment and oppression, but upon 
which, alas, the followers and ministers of Christ have 
been content to build their notion of His kingdom in 
this world and the world to come. 






\Yas the steward wrong in thinking that he was 
meant to win the love of these people about him ? or 
that the treasures wbich God had given him were to 
be the means of winning it? No, surely, he was riirht ; 
ho made the discovery in a roundabout way, which, 
if ho had made it before, would have chano-ed him 
from an unfaithful into a faithful servant. . 
Use the money which God gives you for Him, not for 
yourselves, and it will bring in friends who will not 
merely give you the temporaiy refuge which the cufnt- 



MEN. 57 

off servant sought, but will receive you in your hours 
of weakness and sorrow into their very heart of hearts, 
will bear you with them when they are kneeling in the 
presence of their Father. 

* 

Xoah was verily certain that there was an end de- 
signed for the wickedness of men. When it would 
come he might not know ; but it would come. . . . 
Such faith, once cherished, is fed day by day; it grows 
stronger through the very sight of the evils which are 
so appalling ; it becomes deeper as they become deeper. 
. . . The man who holds it, acts upon it. . . . 
There is called forth in him, through his faith, the 
foresight and wisdom, which are every day departing 
from the heartless anxious self-seekers, who are in con- 
tinual dread of danger, and are continually huntino- 
after safety and comfort. But there is called forth in 
him also, by this same faith, an earnest interest in his 
fellow-men. 

A man M'ho has been what is called lucky or fortu- 
nate in all his enterprises, may feel as if he had no one 
to thank but himself for what he possesses, or, if any- 
thing but himself, some power which does not espe- 
cially want his thanks, and will not set any store by 
them. A man who has failed in whatever he has un- 



58 FAITH AND ACTION. 

der taken, may look upon earth and heaven as if they 
were conspiring against him. But a man who has 
waited long for some good, which has seemed to him 
more blessed each day that has ?iot brought it to him, 
and yet has also seemed each day more improbable — 
who has been sure from the first, that, if it ever came, 
it must be a gift from one who watched over him and 
cared for him, and who, for that very reason, has gone 
on trusting that he shall receive it . . . — such a 
man, when the dream of his heart becomes a substan- 
tial reality, has a sense of grateful joy, which turns to 
pain, which is actually oppressive, till it can find some 
outlet. . . . Out of such feelings comes the crav- 
ing for the power to make some sacrifice, to find a 
sacrifice which shall be not nominal, but real. 

* * 
How can a man who has reposed in the justice and 

affection of a fellow-man, entertain a suspicion that he 
is requiring something of him which is inconsistent 
with both, and merely let that suspicion dwell as one 
of the citizens of his heart? Will it not cause are- 
volt among all the rest? lie can have no peace till he 
sees through his doubt, till it is cleared entirely away. 
And if he has perfectly trusted in his friend, if he is 
one to whom he has always bowed in submission, who 
has taught him all that he knows of what is right and 
true, he will sav, " I do not understand this suggestion 



MEN. 59 

of youi*s. If you mean by it what I mean, all i3 over 
with me — my faith is gone. But that cannot be. I 
will leave nothing undone that will help me to find out 
what it is you really wish of me : at all events, I give 
myself into your hands." Conceive such a trust as 
never can be put in the righteousness of any human 
creature, and this is Abraham's story. 

If a wise teacher, or tender wife or sister, may change 
the whole tone and character of a man's feelino-s to- 
wards one who has grieved him, not by insisting upon 
his hiding them, not by refusing to sympathize with 
them, but by the very gentleness which expresses itself 
in that sympathy ; do you think that a Divine Being 
will not have some more effect upon the mind of a 
worshipper in transfiguring his whole mind, in drawing 
out the truth which is hidden under his complaints, in 
severing them from their earthly ingredients? I could 
not understand worship to mean anything, if I did not 
believe this. I should look upon it as a mere phantasy 
and delusion. As I look upon it to be the greatest of 
all realities, I hold that in it, and in it alone, one is 
taught what a difference prayer wrought in David's 
mind — how much David's actions were affected by 
David's praying, and yet how little we must measure 
the sense and spirit of his prayers by the inconsistency 
of his acts. 



60 FAITH AND ACTION. 






Instead of instructing us tlint the babit of mind 
wbich leads us to climb the hill of the Lord, and the 
habit of cherishing high thoughts of ourselves, are of 
the same kind, (David) assumes that one must destroy 
the other; he who aspires to that height must think 
meanly of himself. . . . Did you ever meet a man 
without any lofty aspirations who was lowly in his 
own eyes? What is there to make him so? He meas- 
ures himself by the standard of people around him. 
If any rise above his own level, he can discover some 
flaw in them which restores his self-complacency; "he 
does all that he thinks it necessary to do ; he is all 
that he wants to be." This is not what we commonly 
understand by humility. 






I do not find that I feel less bitterly (towards men) 
by saying that I ought to bo charitable, and pretend- 
ing to myself that I am, or by adopting large and 
general j)hrases concerning humanity, or by telling 
myself tliat of course such or such an unkind word or 
unkind act does not really move me. Xo man who 
knows himself will trust to these tricks. . . . Nor 
is it possible, nor is it right that we should be without 
objects of hatred. We cannot be so but by the ex- 
tinction of some of our deepest and strongest feelings ; 
nay, but by ceasing to love. What we want is to hate 



MEN. 61 

the evil in ourselves and in all those who hate us ; so 
we learn really to love ourselves, and to love others as 
ourseh^es. 

A judge who makes laws, instead of administering 
them, is not so dangerous a man as a j)riest who under- 
takes on his individual responsi'biUty, or merely in 
general dependence upon the guidance of God's Spirit, 
to frame devotions for a number of people who happen 
to acknoAvledge him as their spiritual director. . . . 
More and more they will become utterances of per- 
sonal feelings, less and less they will assume God's 
teaching as the real spring of these feelings — less and 
less though there be a rejjeated reference in words to 
the divine Spirit. . . . For there is surely no 
deeper error, no greater denial, than that which is 
implied in the notion that a sudden, momentary burst 
of i:)assion comes from the divine afflatus, and that He 
who is emphatically the Spirit of Order, of Peace, of 
continuous Life, is not the author of those acts which 
are preceded by deliberation and reflection. A true 
Church . . . ought, I conceive, to provide us some 
common education, which may be useful in preparing 
our minds both for sudden emergencies and for steady 
exercises. Prayer has to do with the one as much as 
the other. 



62 FAITH AND ACTION, 

# 

When the Apostle (Paul) says, "Work out your 
own salvation, it is God that worketh in yow," he surely 
means us to understand that the work which each is 
carrying on is not a solitary one, that numbers are 
affected by it besides himself, that all true workmen 
are taking part in it. The temptations of men are 
various in their outward forms ; this evil tendency is 
more predominant in one man than in anollier; but 
the slavery into which they bring us is the same, and 
the salvation from it must be the same. 'Jlie slavery 
is the dominion of self ; the man who is overcome by 
lust, by vanity, by anger, alike separates himself from 
his kind, and becomes shut up in himself. Therefore 
the Scripture is wont to describe all evil under the 
name of " covetousness," the desire of things for our 
own sakes, whatever those things may be. ... A 
Church lives only so far as she resists this covetous- 
ness — so far as she encourages her members to feel 
that they are striving together for a common object, 
which God wills that all should possess together; so 
far as she teaches them that He is workins' with us to 
save us from the selfishness which makes the pursuit of 

this common object and the attainment of it impossible. 

* 

Supposing that you could ever say of the life of a 
man, " This life perfectly expresses the mind and pur- 



MEN. 63 

pose of God, this life perfectly shows the life that is 

in Him " — then you would say, " This is the Word of 

God. In Him God speaks out Himself. In him God 

manifests Himself." You w^ould not mean merely that 

sometliing which he spoke proceeded fA)m God, and 

declared wdiat He intended or willed. You would 

mean that he, the whole person, was and is the Word 

of God. 

* 

A man thinks about himself, dwells in himself; the 
rest of the universe lies in shadow. It is not that he 
has not continual transactions with other people ; it is 
not that they do not supply him with tilings that he 
wants : it is not that he could dispense with them. 
But all they do is only contemplated in reference to 
him: they work and suffer and think for him. It is 
not that the things which he looks at are indifferent to 
him ; he depends upon them : whether he has less or 
more of them is his chief concern. But he does not 
wonder at them or enjoy them; they, too, are only his 
ministers. Emphatically, then, he has no fellowship 
with men, no fellowship with Xature. 

. . . (God) would not be seeking the good of 
His voluntary creatures, if He did not raise them above 
themselves ; if He did not give them a perfect, abso- 
lute object to behold and to dwell in. Those of our 



64 FAITH AND ACTION. 

age who speak so much about the glory of humanity, 
affirm that man wants no such object, or cannot attain 
it if he does. Either it is reallv the satisfaction of all 
his wants, or else the only one he can hope for, to be a 
Narcissus, e\'er beholding his own beauty, and becom- 
ing more and more enamoured of it. I am aware that 
many who use this kind of language, would protest 
strongly against the notion that man becomes neces- 
sarily a st^{/-worshipper, a seeker of his own glory, 
because he seeks the glory of his race or kind. I ad- 
mit tlie distinction ; it is a very important one. What 
I desire earnestly is, that they would ask themselves 
liow it may be ])ractically realized. Humanity cannot 
be contemj)lated merely as an abstraction ; it must be 
seen in some one. For a time we may choose a favo- 
rite hero, and think tliat he embodies all we covet to 
behold. Imperfections apjiear in him, or he does not 
meet the new cravings of our mind ; he is discarded, 
another is raised n]», who has a shorter reign. We dis- 
cover that we must not exalt one against another; 
each one carries in him the nature of all; each man 
has that nature very near to him. A great and won- 
derful conviction ! but if existing alone, sure to turn 
into that state of mind which I just now spoke of. 
Around, beneath, above, the man finds no object so 
worthy of his delight, admiration, adoration, as himself. 
. . . I believe we are all haunted by this tendency 



MEN. 65 

to self-glorification every day and liour of our lives. 
. . . It signifies not under what pretext, philo- 
sophical, political, theological, we build altars to our- 
selves; the worshij) is, in all cases, equally accursed. 
To throw down these altars . . . this must be our 
work. But, if we have commenced this j)i*ocess, where 
it always should commence, in our own hearts, we 
shall know that we can only drive out the false by 
turning to the true. 



* 



An individual Christian is often very furious and 
intolerant at a certain staoe of his life. For the con- 
viction that he exists to proclaim a truth which con- 
cerns all men, and which it is miserable for men to 
reject, mingles strangely and incoherently with the 
thought that this truth is his opinion which he is to 
defend against all assailants, which he is to establish. 
Hence a fierce effervescence, like that produced by the 
meeting of an acid and an alkali; hence, oftentimes, 
indifference when that effervescence has subsided, like 
the neutral salt in the other case. And, if the result 
be otherwise, it is always, I believe, because God sub- 
stitutes the certainty which comes from dependence 
on Him for the positiveness which is the result of con- 
fidence in ourselves or in any human authority. 



66 FAITH AND ACTION. 



* 



Who will guard the guardians? who will teach us 
to honor that which in itself is weak, while we are 
strong ? This was the problem which all earnest citi- 
zens and statesmen had to work out. If tliey thouglit 
they could solve it by their sage maxims and skilful 
contrivances, the passions in the hearts, the strength 
in the arms of those whom they ruled, defied and 
mocked them. The lielmsman who depended upon his 
tricks and contrivances for keeping the sea in order, 
had to find tliat tliere is another law governing it 
wliicl) he must learn, to which he must submit, which 
lie cannot alter. The manliness and wisdom of the 
Roni.'in consisted chiefly in that he understood this 
truth better than most nun ; he trusted less to his 
sagacity and more to facts ; he perceived that he could 
only govern by consenting to be governed. 



* 



When you consider how after eiii:hteen centuries, 
Passion ^Week is still remembered in every city in 
Europe — you try to imagine what those must have 
felt who were on the s])ot just at the moment, and 
who had all personal attachment and reverence to 
deepen their amazement. Perhaps they will not be 
able to s])eak at all ; if they do, what words will come 
from their lips! All such expectations are disap- 
pointed. These men are like other men. They are 



MEN. 67 

perplexed and bewildered. They take no measure of 
the events which they have witnessed. The events 
must mean something : what that something is, they 
desire to know. There is a gloom over their hearts ; 
a misty sorrow ; the sense of a blank ; a craving for 
some interpreter of their own strange doubts. . . . 
And so we come to perceive that the thoughts of these 
friends walking to the village near Jerusalem, were in 
all essentials like the thoughts of many friends who 
are walking to villages near London. They may not 
be talking of what happened in the Passion Week. . 
. . But they may be asking each other gloomily and 
despairingly, whether all the hopes they bad once cher- 
ished of something better and nobler for the world 
and for themselves have not been scattered : whether 
friends to whom they looked up have not gone out of 
their sight or failed to fulfil their promises ; whether 
the tidings they heard in their childhood of a Revela- 
tion to man, and a Redemj^tion to men, have not lost 
their meaning and power. How many are living now 
with this weight on their hearts. How many show by 
their speech and their looks that they are sad ! 

* 

We are told that circumstances have changed. . 
. . Doubtless, the saying is true ; circumstances are 
always changing; but the necessities of man's beino^ 



68 



FAITH AND ACTION. 



clo not change. VHiat was true of man generations 
ago, is true now. 






A man will not be really intelligible to yon, if, in- 
stead of listening to him and sympathizing with him, 
you determine to classify him. 






At what point the strong conviction of a truth which 
must be divine, which must be given us from above, 
becomes mixed with self-exaltation, with the desire of 
showing how wise we are, and of exercising a dominion 
over others for our own sakes, it is hard to determine 
in any case. The more we know of ourselves, the 
more we shall understand how it is i)0ssible to vibrate 
between the certainty we have of j)rinciples, which 
for the sake of our moral being we cannot part with, 
and a positiveness about notions which we have 
grounded upon them. AVhen the conscience is clear, 
when the man is lowly, when lie has been subdued by 
discipline, the opposition seems clear to him as between 
day and night; the delusion of his own heart is niniii- 
fested to him by the light which God has kindled 
there. But amidst the noise of human applause the 
distinction which was so definite vanishes, the precious 
and the vile become hopelessly mingled. Such personal 
experiences, which nil have had in a greater or less 
d^gi-ee . . . may help us to read the biographies 



3IEN. 69 

of men who have had a great influence upon the v/orlcl, 
with a kindlier and truer feeling. Their impressions 
were, doubtless, more overj)ovvering than ours, their 
conflicts greater, their tem[)tations severer. It is hard 
to say that, because they called themselves ins]>iref1, 
they meant to deceive; that language might be the 
language of humility, not of arrogance. . . . Kot 
in this conviction, but in that pride which forgets God 
— in the desire to be somethinsj in themselves — do 
we trace the beginning of all imjiosture. 

A teacher may, indeed, exercise a much greater 
power by reviving what is old than by inventing what 
is new ; but to revive a principle, he must have been 
penetrated by it, it must have taken possession of him, 
it must have inspired his whole being: otherwise he 
could never impart it to others. Something of this 
sort must have been the case with Mahomet. 

In the seventh century after Christ, Mahomet claims 
to be called of God to a work. TVe may believe that 
in many points he greatly mistook the nature of this 
call, of this work. But the principle that any man 
who rouses the heart of a nation, who proclaims any 
daep truth in the midst of it, has a calling — a calling 
from God — that he has no rioht to denv it or exi)lain 
it away; that he cannot do what he is meant to do 



70 FAITH AXL ACTION. 

except on the faith of it ; this is a conviction which 
we Christians, like the Mahometan, have inherited, or 
ought to have inherited from the Jew. 

There is, no doubt, in some persons a very wonderful 
apprehension and divination of that which others are 
thinking, imagining, purposing. Those who really have 
that gift, — who do not merely fancy they have it and 
make all kinds of false, sus])icious, and ill-natured 
guesses about their neighbors — we call men and 
women of genius. Sympathy has much to do with 
genius, perhaps is the essence of it. But it cannot 
exist, I aj)prehend, except in a pcrscm Mho has a lively 
consciousness of what is passing in Jdm. lie is awake 
to that, and so can make more than a guess at wliat is 
passing in me. . . . The act of conscience is an 
act in me. It means "I ought, or I ought not." I may 
pass judgment on other men's acts; but that is another 
process ; I am abusing terms and what the terms rep- 
resent if I identify it with the conscience. 

* # 
The distinction of the civilized man from the savage 
is, as it seems to me, that he is not, to the same extent, 
the victim of external influences, that he rises .above 
them and tries to rule them. The external authority 
of the parent or teacher, I maintain, is useless unless 



MEN. 71 

he appeals to that which is within the child, is mis- 
chievous unless it is exerted to call that forth. The 
external autliority mu§t become an internal authority, 
not co-operating with the forces wliich are seeking to 
crush the I in the child but workin<r ai^ainst those 
forces, working to deliver the child from their domin- 
ion. The punishments therefore which are the weap- 
ons of this authority . . . must be directed expressly 
to this purpose. ... If the child is taught to 
have a dread of (the teacher) as one who is an inflicter 
of pain, not to have a reverence for him as one who 
cares for it, and is seeking to save it from its own folly 
— if the child is instructed carefully to separate the 
pain arising out of its own acts from the pain which 
he inflicts, so that it may associate the pain with him 
rather than with them — then all has been done wliich 
human art can do to make it grow uj) a contemptible 
coward, crouching to eveiy majority which threatens 
it with the punishments that it has learnt to regard as 
the greatest and only evils ; one who may at last . . 
. become the spontaneous agent of a majority in 
trampling out in others the freedom which has been 
so assiduously trampled out in him. A parent or a 
teacher who pursues this object is of all the ministers 
of a community the one whom it should regard with 
the greatest abhorrence, seeing that he is bringing up 
for it, not citizens, but slaves. 



72 FAITH AND ACTION. 

There are grave doubts among men of the world 
whether the student of morals has any real subject to 
treat of. He can talk much about the blessings of 
virtue and the mischiefs of vice. But Lord Macaulay, 
who spent a great part of his life in dealing with vir- 
tues and vices as a legislator, or in recording the effects 
of them as a historian, said . . . that the most 
brilliant writer upon them did not deserve half the 
gratitude from mankind which is due to the maker of 
a substantial jjair of shoes. 

. . . To the Buddhist, the belief in God is the 
most awful, and at the same time the most real, of all 
thoughts; one not thrust back into the corner of a 
mind which is occupied by everything else, but Mhich 
he thinks demands the hiirhest and most refined exer- 
cise of all the faculty that he has. It is something 
which is to make a change in liimself, which is at once 
to destroy him and to perfect him. And the effect is 
a i)ractical one. Buddha is ever at rest. Can his 
worshipper be turbulent? Can he admit any rude or 
violent passions into his heart? He must cultivate 
gentleness, evenness, all serene and peaceful qualities, 
reverence and tenderness to all creatures, or he is not 
in his rightful state. ITe is not tempted, or obliged, 
as the Brahmin is, to look upon any human ci-eature as 



MEN. 73 

merely animal, as excluded even from the highest privi- 
leges. . . .' The poorest man of the vilest race 
may become one with Buddha. Hence, though he be- 
lono's to no priestly family, all his functions are more 
essentially those of a priest than a Brahmin's can be. 
He claims no civil distinction ; he is to be reverenced 
simply as offering up prayers for the peace and pros- 
perity of all other people. 

■ # 

It is no doubt true that a man who follows his own 
notions and vagaries may be as far from the laws of 
the universe as the man who accepts all the traditions 
of other days. But those w^ho, under pretence of hin- 
dering notions and vagaries, try in any degree to for- 
bid or discourage the exercise of men's thoughts in 
reference to these laws, are laboring that they may be 
always hidden. The laws may reveal themselves to 
any seeker if he be ever so blundering a one. They 
will not reveal themselves to anv one who is content 
with his own opinions and does not wish to change 
them for truth. It is a reasonable assertion tliat any 
man who interferes with these investigations, is an 
enemy of the Liberty of Conscience. 

* 

We have seen that the Brahm of the Hindoo, the 
Buddha of that mighty sect which arose out of Hin- 



74 FAITH AND ACTION. 

dooism, is especially the Intelligent Being, He in whom 
light dwells, and by communication with whom men 
become enlightened. Observe how naturally, how in- 
evitably, one uses this word Light for Intelligence. 
We feel instinctively that it is much the bettei- word 
of the two. ... So men have felt in all countries 
and as^es. Their bodilv eye distinmiished one thinsf 
from another. They had as certainly something within 
them which could discern a sense in words, a meaning 
in things. This surely was an eye too. . . . And 
there must be some light answering to this eye, older 
than it, otherwise it could not be. They discovered, 
too surely also, that there was a state in which this 
eye saw nothing, a state of darkness. If we keep 
these very simple thoughts in our minds, . . . and 
if we recollect that what we are apt to overlook as too 
simple is oftentimes just the most important thing of 
all — the key which unlocks a multitude of treasure- 
houses — we shall be able to enter into the belief of 
different people, and to trace the transition from one 

to another far more easily. 

* 
# * 

"When I ask for the secret of that specially real and 
practical character which all ages have concurred in 
attributing to Socrates, I fin<l it in his Egotism. I 
might give you instances of what I mean from either 
of his disciples, but Xenophon's testimony in this case 



MEN. 75 

at least might be more suspected. He was a soldier 
and a man of business ; when he speaks of Socrates as 
practical, we might fancy he gave his master credit for 
the quality which he joreferred to all others, and which 
he had acquired in the world. . . . The passage 
which I shall choose from (Plato) is taken from one 
of his most poetical dialogues ; it occurs at the begin- 
ning of the Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus are sit- 
ting near the spot from which Boreas was reported to 
have carried off the nymph Oreithyia. Socrates has 
heard such explanations ; they are ingenious ; he ad- 
mires the cleverness of those who invented them. But, 
if he resorts to this kind of interpretation for the 
story of Boreas, he must treat Gorgons, Centaurs, 
Chimaeras, after the same fashion. . . . "And my 
friend," he says, " I cannot find leisure for it. I have 
not yet complied with the precept of the oracle ; I am 
not yet able to know myself. It seems to me ridicu- 
lous whilst I am in this ignorance to busy myself with 
subjects which lie at a distance from me." . . . 
Here is the Egotist. And here is the practical man 
we have all heard of. He who could dismiss all ques- 
tions about Boreas and Oreithyia that he might settle 
accounts with himself . . . might indeed be said 
to bring philosophy out of the cloud-land to the terra 
firma. . . . Nor can we wonder at the power 
which he had of attracting men, especially young men, 



76 FAITH A^'^D ACTION, 

to hiai, or at the bitter hostility which he provoked. 
There is no attraction in general formulas and propo- 
sitions; there is an immense charm in one, however 
uncouth in his appearance, who can enter into desires 
and perplexities, which he has fii'st realized in his own 
life, and through which he has fought his way. There 
is no terror in mere propositions and formulas, there is 
great terror in one who arouses us to remember that 
which we would rather forget ; he would take from us 
the Lethe cup ; we may be willing that he should drain 
the cup of hemlock. 

Epictetus has sent down to us not his groans, but 
his tlianksirivinirs, that he was not bound to be a slave 
such as he perceived Nero was ; that, being Epictetus, 
he might enjoy freedom, if he did not cast it away. 
For this he said was slavery, to be the victim of the 
representations made to the senses, — of all the im- 
pressions which we receive from without. To this 
iirnominious state of bondage Nero was reduced. Able 
to command all pleasures, able to decline all pains, the 
]H)ov man was the passive victim of the things about 
him ; lie was sinkins: lower and lower under their 
dominion ; he was less and less able to assert himself. 
It" Epictetus was a slave, submission to these impres- 
sions, not the power of a master to send him to the 
mines or to inflict chastisement upon him, was the 



MEN. 77 



cause of his slavery. If he did not fasten the chains 
upon himself, no one else could j)ut them on him ; he 
had the key of the prison doors. 






The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius exhibit a man 
who is striving by all means that he knows of — by 
the help of old traditions, of family attachments, of 
one or another form of Greek wisdom — to recover 
something which he feels has departed, or is departing 
from his country, from those who are governing in it, 
from those who are servino- in it. The grreatness of a 
battle conducted under such circumstances I cannot 
appreciate ; if I dared speak of it in the language of 
some as a wonderful effort of unassisted reason, I 
contradict my faith. . . I believe the conscience 
and reason of Marcus Aurelius could not have been 
called forth — as I believe yours and mine cannot — 
by any less Divine Teacher tlian the one whom he 
confessed, but knew not how to name. 



=* 
* * 



(Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) wrote in Greek ; he 
dwelt in all the effeminacy of a Court. But he desired 
above all things, he says, to be a male and a Roman. 
What he meant by that we can understand from his 
acts, and also from his thoughts ; for he is one of those 
wlio has let us look into the secrets of his life ; who has 
told us what he was striving to be, and what helps and 



78 FAITH AND ACTION. 

hindrances he met with in his strivings. He had evi- 
dently taken account of the causes which had made 
the Roman a ruler of the world. He had seen that 
self-restraint had been one main secret of his power ; 
that reverence for the relations in which he found 
himself had been another. Out of both had come the 
habit of obedience ; that obedience was involved in the 
oath of the soldier ; that obedience was the only se- 
curity for the fidelity of the citizen. 

. . . Cicero's character is a complicated one, hard 
to describe faithfully upon a single liypothesis, capable 
of being contem})lated on various sides, supplying plen- 
tiful excuses for a severe criticism as well as for cordial 
admiration. Since he was the man who was most per- 
fectly seasoned in Greek literature of all his cotempo- 
raries ; since he was at the same time essentially Latin 
in thoughts, language, affections, character, and re- 
garded all his Greek culture as ornamental and sub- 
sidiary; since, nevertheless, he has taken more pain« to 
show us how it might, in his judgment, be helpful to 
the main object of the Roman's life ; — he must be the 
best illustration we can find, both in his person and 
his writings, of the whole subject. His vanity belongs 
to himself; his political oscillations, and his domestic 
failures, much more to his time; the uncertainty of 
his conclusions, to his educntion both in the schools 



MEN. 79 

and at the bar. But beneath all these there lies the 
Roman reverence, the Roman sense of duty, the Roman 
tenderness and affection, and, I must add, laying stress 
upon the adjective, the Roman love of truth. That 
love of truth was altosjether distinct from the Greek 
love of it. Truth in itself Cicero did not pursue or 
care for, or know the meaning of. But truth in insti- 
tutions, truth in character, truth in the ordinary deal- 
ings of men, he did admire very heartily, even if 
various influences to the right and to the left made 
him deviate often and sadly from his standard. 

Napoleon the First, when about fifteen years of age, 
was in the military school at Paris. He complained 
to the superintendents of the school about its arrange- 
ments. What do you suppose were his objections to 
them ? He said the fare of himself and his brother 
scholars was too luxurious. It could not prepare them 
for living in poor households, still less for the hard- 
ships of the camp. He urged that, instead of having 
two courses a day, they should have ammunition bread 
and soldiers' rations and that they should be compelled 
to mend and clean their own stockings and shoes. 
Here you have a young Ascetic. . . He chose 
what was painful in preference to what was pleasant. 
And because he did so, he was able hereafter to 
trample upon those peoples and monarchs wiio ac- 



80 FAITH AND ACTION. 

counted pleasure the end of life, whose greatest desire 
was to avoid pain. Ko Alpine snows, no armed men 
could withstand him. Only when he encountered 
men, who had learned, as he had learned, to claim do- 
minion over circumstances, to endure suffering for the 
sake of a higher end, could that strength, which lie 
had won through his Asceticism, be broken. Napoleon 
was no theorist, he hated theories. He wanted to 
be independent of his own inclinations that he might 
exercise power over other men. The stoical theory 
was deduced from an observation how much power a 
man possesses who is not the victim of pleasures or of 
pains. 

Liberty of Conscience cannot mean liberty to c?o what 
I like. That we have seen, in the judgment of the 
wisest men, of those who speak most from experience, 
is bondacre. It is from mv likino^s ^.hat I must be 
emancipated if I would be a free-man. It cannot 
mean liberty to tJihJc what I choose. Such men as 
Marcus Aurelius discovered the slavery which came 
from thinking what they chose, the necessity of bring- 
ing their thoughts under government lest they should 
become their oi)pressors. Every teacher of physical 
Science . . . repeats the same lesson. The scien- 
tific man bids us seek the thing as it is. lie tells us 
that we are always in danger of putting our thoughts 



MEN. 81 

or conceptions of tlie thing between us and that which 
is. He gives us a discipline for our thoughts that they 
may not pervert the facts wliich we are examining. . 
. . When Galileo said to those who condemned him, 
" And yet the earth does move," he said, " Xeither my 
thoughts nor the thoughts of all the doctors and priests 
that live now or ever have lived can the least alter 
facts. You have no right, I have no right, to deter- 
mine what is. All our determinations must fall before 
the truth when that is discovered to us." 



in. 

REFORMS. 

To assert a divine true Fatherhood in place of the 
paternal tyrannies which have counterfeited it, must, I 
conceive, be the work of those who would educate and 
civilize the nations in the way in which they never 
have been educated and civilized, and never can be by 
those who merely seek, even with the utmost skill, to 
cultivate their material prosperity, at the expense of 
their inward life. 

# 

We have . . . never doubted that the whole 
country must look for its blessings through the eleva- 
tion of the Working Class, that we must all sink if 
that is not raised. We have never dreamed that that 
class could be benefited, by losing its working charac- 
ler, by acquiring habits of ease, or self-indulgence. 
We have rather thought tliat all must learn the dig- 
iiity of labor and the I>lessing of self-restraint. We 
could not talk to suffering men of intellectual or moral 
improvement, without first taking an interest in their 

82 



BEFORMS. 83 

physical condition and their ordinary occupations ; but 
we felt that any interest of this kind would be utterly 
wasted, that it would do harm and not good, if it were 
not the means of leadinsj them to reofard themselves as 
human beino-s made in the imao;e of God. 

A multitude of . . . influences 
. . are tending to make Work not that brave noble 
occupation of men's hands which is so beneficial to the 
labor and the rest of their minds, but a feverish effort 
to produce quickly that which may look well, and be 
puffed largely, and be sold at a low rate, to the great 
loss of the purchaser. The sense of responsibility 
which led the Greek to be as dilig^ent in working^ out 
that part of the statue which would be liidden by the 
wall of the temple as that part which would be ex- 
posed to the eye, because the gods would look upon 
both, seems to have departed from Christendom, which 
should cherish it most. 

That all the gifts which any have received through 
one instrumentality or another, all general knowledge, 
all professional knowledge — and that which we may 
be rich in if we are poor in these, experience of our 
own failures and errors, of the wrongs we have done, 
of the good we have missed — should be turned to the 



84 FAITH AND ACTION. 

service of that class which is, indeed, not a class, but 
which represents the stuff of Immanity after class dis- 
tinctions have been removed from it — in which lie the 
germs of the worst evil, and of the best good that is in 
any of the classes — the Working-men — this is the 
doctrine that I have maintained in the Lectures on 
Learning and Working. 

We must learn . . . that the order of society, 
like the order of nature, was not created by us for our 
convenience, and cannot shape itself according to our 
convenience : that we are all its subjects ; that it 
asserts itself ; that it avenges itself : that we are hum- 
bly and devoutly to ask wliat its demands upon us are, 
and whence we can obtain the power of fullllling them. 
Then when we have received a little of this wisdom 

. . . we may be able to raise our working peo- 
ple out of some of the delusions to whicli they, as well 
as we, are prone. AVe may lead them to ])erceive, 
since we shall first have perceived it ourselves, that 
obedience is not hard and servile compulsion ; that 
politics are not created in conformity to certain theo- 
ries of ours : . . . that every piece of machinery, — 
that the commonest acts of those who use machinery; 
— indicate the divine laws to which the sun and stars 
do homaore. 



BEFOBMS. 85 






The bodily energies being given to man by his Cre- 
ator, and being liable to all abuse — the senses being 
given to man by his Creator, and being liable to all 
abuse — no education can be sound and true which 
makes liglit of either, whicli does not treat the devel- 
opment of them as a solemn duty, not merely as a bye 



work. 






What we want to make workinsr men feel is that the 
ordinary business of life is compatible with — nay, is in 
strictest harmony with — the best and highest knowl- 
edge. They have been almost utterly separated in 
their minds, to a great extent they have been separated 
in ours : our business is, to reconcile them in botli. 



* 
# * 



Oh ! let us give over our miserable notion that poor 
men only want teaching about things on the surface, 
or will ever be satisfied with such teaching ! They are 
groping about the roots of things whether we know it 
or not. You must meet them in their underground 
search, and show them the way into daylight, if you 
want true and brave citizens, not a community of 
dupes and quacks. 



* 



. . . . AVe have found an unbelief in the author- 
ity of the Bible very common among the working-men : 



86 FAITH AND ACTION. 

we have found infidel notions of all kinds prevailing 
among them ; we have found these notions gaining 
immense strength from the notion that the Scripture 
refers to a future world and not to the present. Our 
great object has been to encounter this infidelity by- 
showing them that the Bible, taken in its most simple 
literal sense, declares God to be the present rulef of 
the world, and that, if they have faith in Him and in 
His word, they will find a help and a teacher in their 
daily perplexities, in their common life, which will 
save them from resorting to demagogues as ignorant 

as themselves. 

* 

There is a kind of Christianized teaching about phi- 
lology, history, physiology, which seems to me most 
unchristian. It is offensive to the scientific man, be- 
cause it twists facts to a moral ; to the devout man, 
because it treats the laws of God's universe and His 
acts as less sacred than our inferences from them ; to 
the workingman, because he asks us to help him to see 
the truth of things, and he thinks we are plotting to 
deceive him. If you regard Christianity as something 
which is to be spread and sprinkled over the surface of 
things, to prevent truth from being dangerous — if you 
have not courage to look into the roots of knowledge 
and science, because you are sure that the God of truth 
and righteousness is there — you had better leave the 



BEFOBMS. 87 

workingman alone, unless you desire to make him a 
thousand times more of an infidel than you give him 
credit for being already. 

God's order seems to me more than ever the antao^- 
onist of man's system ; Christian Socialism is in my 
mind the assertion of God's order. Every attempt, 
however small and feeble, to bring it forth, I honor and 
desire to assist. Every attempt to hide it un-der a 
great machinery, call it Organization of Labor, Central 
Board, or what you like, I must protest against as hin- 
dering the gradual development of what I regard as a 
divine purpose, as an attempt to create a new consti- 
tution of Society, when what we want is that the old 
constitution should exhibit its true functions and ener- 
gies. 

To set trade and commerce riofht we must find some 
ground, not for them, but for those who are concerned 
in them, for men to stand upon. 

I am most thankful to be able to connect Church 
Reformation with social Reformation — to have all 
one's thoughts tested by their application to actual 
work and by their power of meeting the wants of suf- 
fering, discontented, resolute men. Whatever will 



88 FAITH AND ACTION. 

not stand that trial is not good for much. I am sm-e 
that all which is of God in my desires and methods 
will: that what is my own will be exposed and cast 
out as it ousjht to be. 

The good master ... is the one who allows 
least influence to tlie principle of competition in deter- 
mining his own acts towards the workmen, and the 
one who is most careful that he shall rule competition, 
making it, as he says, a competition for excellence, in- 
stead of cheapness, and that competition shall not rule 
him. I accept the definition and fully believe that the 
more encouragement we give to the principle of asso- 
ciation, the more of such masters we shall form. 
I apprehend that every successful strike tends to give 
the workmen a very undue and dangerous sense of 
their own power, and a very alarming contempt for 
their employer, and that eveiy unsuccessful strike 
drives them to desperate and wild courses. In unnnir 
them to direct their passion for association, which can 
never cease among them and is just now especially 
rampant, into a different channel, I think we are favor- 
ing the cause of order, diminishing the rage against 
capital, and helping the manufacturers much more than 
they will help themselves if they merely raise a wild 
cry against Socialism. 



REFORMS. 89 

If great commercial enterprises require the co-opera- 
tion and predominance of the capitalist, as I am not 
at all disposed to deny that they do, then the capitalist 
will find his proper field. He will be obliged, I be- 
lieve, in due time, to admit his workmen to a share of 
his profits, but I question exceedingly whether he will 
find those workmen at all disposed to controvert his 
judgment about the best way of realizing ultimate ad- 
vantages, if he gives them an adequate support com- 
mensurate to their services, such support, of course, to 
be deducted from their future gains. In the mean- 
time, so far as I can observe, the workmen are most 
glad, only too glad, to defer to the intelligent and ex- 
perienced capitalist if they see that he has their inter- 
est at heart as well as his own. 

What I liave tried to say is that the reorganizers of 
society and the conservators of society are at war, 
because they start from the same vicious premisses ; 
because they tacitly assume lands, goods, money, labor, 
some subjects of possession, to be the basis of society 
and therefore wish to bei^in bv champing: or maintainino;; 
tlie conditions, of that possession : whereas, the true 
radical reform and radical conservation must <t:o much 
deeper and say : Human relations not only should lie, 
but do lie beneath all these, and when vou substitute 



90 FAITH AND ACTION. 

— upon one pretext or another — property relations 
for these . . . you introduce hopeless anarchy. 

. . . We have tried to teach the workingmen in 
our words what we have tried to show them in our 
acts — that Christianity is the only means of promot- 
ing their well-being, and counteracting the moral evils 
which lie at the root of their physical evils. . . . 
We have protested against tlie spirit of competition 
and rivah-y precisely because we believe it is leading 
to anarcliy, and must destroy at last the property of 
the rich as well as the existence of the poor. 

* 
# * 

There is certainly an impression abroad, which is 
shared by some of the most zealous supporters of pop- 
ular education, that our schools for the poor . . . 
are not bringing up helpful, intelligent workers, that, 
from some accident or other, their learning and work 
stand altogether ai)art from each other, so that the 
best scholar may sometimes almost seem to have had 
the faculties dulled and stunted which he needs for 
the toils in which he must be engaged. If this is the 
case, we ought to know it and confess it. . . . We 
ouMit freelv to admit that any education which fails to 
make poor men or rich men efficient in action, is an 
unsatisfactory education — one which needs to be 



REFORMS. 91 

reformed, . not only for the sake of its results, but 
because the studies which produce such results cannot 
themselves be sincere and wholesome. 

Amongst us, more than amongst our fathers of the 
last century, the questions are debated. How are w^e 
to educate ourselves, how are we to educate men and 
women and children of different classes, from the high- 
est to the lowest? Till we determine what we are, 
what there is in these men and women and children 
which can be educated, till we settle whether we are 
to be treated and are to treat others as atoms of a 
mass, or whether each of us is a distinct I, and must 
be taught to believe that he is so and to act as if he 
were, I cannot conceive that we shall make much ad- 
vance in the Science of Education. 

# * 
It will avail nothing to offer prizes to men of all 
conditions : such a scheme may create a race of nimble 
clerks, it will form no seers and statesmen ; — if you 
do not set before the people of England some standard 
of worth such as no prizes ever taught them to con- 
template, — if you do not offer thetn some sincere 
knowledge, such as prizes often tempt them to ex- 
change for what is most glossy and superficial. Let 



92 FAITH AND ACTION, 

the skilful quill-driver have his reward . . . but, 
if we want to create heroes, or to save them from per- 
ishing when we have them, let those who used to boast 
that they existed to form English gentlemen, show 
that their occupation is not gone ; only that they be- 
lieve gentleness is not tied to wealth, not even to 
birth ; that God can cultivate it and would cultivate 
it, in the collier and street-sweeper. 

* * 

. . . Those who think most earnestly of infant 
education must think of adult education. . . . They 
cannot expect to teacli infants by infants. They must 
above all things desire that the mothers should have 
wise, loyal, English hearts. By all means let us labor 
for that end. If I did not believe that the education 
of workingmen would lead us by the most direct road 
to the education of working-women, I should care 
much less for it. 

* * 

What we want is not to put things into our pupils' 
minds so much as to set in order what we find there, 
to untie knots, to disentangle complicated threads. . 
. . If there be in every artisan the seeds of all the 
theories of morals that have ever existed in the world ; 
if you see these seeds bearing fruit in different parts 
of his practice ; if he is the selfish man and the be- 



REFORMS. 93 

nevolent man, the idealist and the pursuer of compro- 
mises, the seeker of pleasure and the sufferer of pain 
a hundred times in the same week ; then I know noth- 
ing more interesting, or that may be more useful than 
to follow out these different tracks. . . . The 
effort presumes some knowledge of what is going on 
in the minds of our pupils and in our own, together 
with a sense that it is very fragmentary, and needs to 
be increased by intercourse Avith them and with our- 
selves. It presumes, also, that we have sufficient faith 
in what we have hold of, to be willing that it sliould 
be subjected to all possible tests. . . . Like all 
efforts, it must be attended with much humiliation; 
but then what a reward ! 

A teacher may give the most cordial welcome to the 
convictions and hopes which he will find stirring in 
the hearts of the workingmen, and yet may bring the 
experience of history to remove their prejudices and 
diminish their asperities. This cannot be, if we do 
not come to the task with a willingness to have our 
own theories broken to pieces by facts; desirous to 
find men better than we have supposed them to be ; 
determined to show that what is right and true must 
be mightier and must show itself to be mightier than 
we and all other men are. 



94 FAITH AXD ACTION. 



* 



The more "we look upon man as a spiritual being, 
the more we reorard education as intended to brino: 
forth his spirit, the more we shall desire to train his 
animal nature and his senses, because they will cer- 
tainly enslave his spirit, if they are not made its ser- 
vants. 

We certainly believe that the Socialism which Mr. 
Southey and other eminent Conservatives accepted as 
a solution of some of the greatest practical difficulties 
of England, if it were based upon Christianity, might 
be the most powerful protection of the land against 
anarchical notions and practices, whether taking the 
name of Socialism or adopted as precautions against it. 
AYe have formed small associations among working- 
men for the carrying on of their own trades, in which 
the Sunday is a day of rest, intemperance is checked, 
political agitation is discouraged. We know that, by 
so doing we have led some workmen to see the folly 
and danger of strikes. . . . 

* * 
Competition is put forth as the law of the universe. 

That is a lie. The time is come for us to declare that 
it is a lie by word and deed. I see no way but associ- 
ating for work instead of for strikes. I do not say or 
think we feel that the relation of employer and em- 



REFORMS. 95 

ployed is not a true relation. I do not determine that 
wages may not be a righteous mode of expressing that 
relation. But at present it is clear that this relation is 
destroyed, that the payment of wages is nothing but a 
deception. We may restore the whole state of things ; 
we may bring in a new one. God will decide that. 
His voice has gone forth clearly bidding us come 
forward to fight against the present state of things. 

* 

. Almost any risk should be incurred . . . 
for the sake of making the laborers understand that 
citizenship is a reality, that civilization is not a curse, 
that the same power which enabled their forefathers 
to work together in spite of all the tendencies to soli- 
tude and rivalship in the fourteenth century, can en- 
able them to overcome the same tendencies, in the 
more fortunate circumstances of the nineteenth. . . 
. The princijDle of Trade is reciprocity, not overreach- 
ing. 

My principle is good for nothing if it depends upon 
social accidents, if it is not as valid for those who pay 
wages as for those who claim the fealty of vassals. 
Family Relations last on through all changes ; I claim 
the Relation of Master and Servant as one of these. . 
. . I rejoice in all those facts which prove that the 
Servant has a legal status : that he has as much claim 



96 FAITH AND ACTION. 

against his Master in the Courts as his Master has 
against him. . . . But I am sure that unless (Master 
and Servant) learn that reverence for each other 
which neither feudal bonds nor legal securities can 
create, they will become more and more enemies to 
each other. 

The greatest good of all to Law, Physic, and Divin- 
ity, may be expected, as I think, if lawyers, physicians 
and divines, determine in their hearts that the hand 
workers shall not be mere drudcjes more than them- 
selves, that they also shall be taught how to work as 
men, that they shall have such Freedom and such an 
Order as no arrangements of society, without a spirit 
to direct them and the men who compose the society, 
can ever give. 

If . . . we are consistent with our own habitual pro- 
fessions, we must aim in all our teaching of the working 
classes, at making them free. We know that they feel 
themselves shackled in a thousand ways: that they ask 
to be delivered from their shackles. They may be wrong 
in some of their notions about the nature of their 
bondage; they are not wrong about XhQ fact of it. If 
you think that it is upon their souls, and not upon 
their bodies, then you will set about emancipating 
their souls. If the distinction between a freeman and 
a slave, as Mrs. Stowe has taught us, ... is iden- 



REFOBMS. 97 

tical with the distinction between a Person and a 
Thing, you will seek above all things to make our 
working people understand that they are Persons, and 
not Things. 

* * 
I have often felt as if the phrases "manly educa- 
tion " — " education for men " — which I have used so 
often in these Lectures, must have an offensive sound, 
as if 1 were devising a teachinoi; which should be con- 
fined to one sex. But I have adopted these phrases 
deliberately, being certain that, by employing them, 
I am doing my best to vindicate a high education for 
women. Where the education of men is not manly — 
where it is effeminate — they will always be disposed 
to degrade their wives and sisters ; they w^U always be 
suspicious of theii» rivalry. Yv^hen it has been most 
masculine — as in Queen Elizabeth's days — the cul- 
ture of women has been free and noble in the same 
proportion. 

I do not know any man who has seriously thought 
of our present examination system who does not feel 
that it is undermining the physical, intellectual and 
moral life of young men, and that it may do this with 
even more terrible effect for girls, if they are admitted, 
as of course they should be, to all the privileges of the 
other sex. . . . You must know well that noble 



98 FAITH AND ACTION. 

intellects, which crave for a free culture, are dwarfed 
by the notion that what they have read and thought is 
not to be tested and ascertained by the questions of 
wiser men, but that they are to read and think simply 
with a view to the questions. 

* * 

No one, I believe, knows the extent of confusion 
and perplexity which there is in the minds of young 
men at the present day, nor the little hope they have 
of coming out of it, nor their readiness to turn any- 
where for the help which they cannot find among 
divines. Would that I could speak what I feel some- 
times is in me ; but it must come out in acts more than 
words, and God can find other and better instruments, 
and I am sure will. 

* * 

. . . When we have got rid of these confused 
notions which have fastened themselves to the cry for 
Liberty of Conscience, there remains a most whole- 
some and indis])ensable protest in it to which no States- 
men or Churchmen or Philosophers can be indifferent 
except at their great peril. The opinion has prevailed 
amouG: all three that the Conscience is a troublesome 
disturber of the peace, which it may be necessary to 
endure, but which it would be very desirable to silence. 
So long as that doctrine prevails, so long as any frag- 



BEFOBMS, 99 

ment or shred of it remains in our minds, we may talk 
about persecution as much as we please : we may boast 
of our age for having' discovered the inutility of per- 
secution; but we shall, under one pretext, or other, fall 
back upon it. . . . What satisfactory demonstrations 
there will be that we are really vindicating toleration 
when we are most intolerant, that v. e are not interfering 
with a man's belief, but only with his desire to crush 
ours ! Therefore I deem it needful to proclaim that in 
every instance to which we can point, a Society which 
has succeeded in choking or weakening the Conscience 
of any of its members has undermined its own exist- 
ence, and that the defeat of such experiments has been 
the preservation and security of the Society that has 
attempted them. 

I have the best reason to know that the minds of 
numbers in all classes of society — of young men, espe- 
cially, — are unsettled, not on some trifling or secon- 
dary questions, but on those which affect their inmost 
faith and their practical conduct, on those which con- 
cern the character of God and their relations to Him. 
. . . I have -maintained . . . that there is no 
safety but in looking fairly in the face all the difficul- 
ties which beset ourselves ; but in frankly meeting all 
the difficulties which torment our brethren ; that God 
encourages us to do this ; that by doing it we show 



100 FAITH AND ACTION. 

that we trust Him to give us the help which He has 
promised us, a hel]) which can deliver us from false- 
hood and guide us into all truth. 

"Weaker men may be crushed under the thought of 
what it is which the greatest number require and bow 
they are ever to attain what they require. But if they 
are driven in their despair to think that there is One 
who knows this better than they do — if that is the 
only belief in which they are able to work for their 
fellow-men — they cannot be otherwise than grateful 
to (Mr. Bentham) for suggesting the aim which they 
own Hhat they are quite unable to reach, (by his 
" Greatest Hajypiness of the greatest mimher,'''') It is 
not, indeed, in a comfortable Optimism that they can 
ever find refuge from the palpable evils which he has 
set before them or from the sense of their own im- 
potence. Those who have ever wished for the great- 
est happiness of a majority of their race or of the 
whole of it, cannot acquiesce in any pleasant dreams 
that somehow it will drop upon them from the skies. 
They know that it is better to be miserable than to 
take up with a lie : that nothing is so miserable as a 
lie. The service Mr. Bentham will have done them is 
in leading them to ask themselves whether there is not 
a Truth in which the greatest number of men — in 
which all men — may trust, and whether that Truth 



REFORMS. 101 

will not make them free. If there is a Happiness 
without Freedom, or beyond it, they may wait to learn 
what that is. 

The fact is, that there is that in every man which calls 
out for salvation from drunkenness : there is a man 
within him who wants another life, and w4io at the same 
time confesses his incapacity to rise to that higher life. 
. . . If you speak to the human being in him, I do 
not say that he will understand you. It may be a 
long time before you get to understand him, or he, 
you. But I do say that the message of God's king- 
dom, the message of eternal life, will reach him as no 
message about happiness ever will. 

We want for the establishment and rectification of 
our Social Morality not to dream ourselves into some 
imaginary past or some imaginary future, but to use 
that which we have, to believe our own professions, 
to live as if all we utter wdien we seem to be most in 
earnest were not a lie. Then we may find that the 
principle and habit of self-sacrifice which is expressed 
in the most comprehensive human Worship supplies 
the underground for national Equity, Freedom, Cour- 
age ; for the courtesies of common intercourse, the 
homely virtues and graces which can be brought under 
no rules, but which constitute the chief charm of life. 



102 FAITH AND ACTION. 

and tend most to abate its miseries. Then every 
tremendous struggle with ourselves whether we shall 
degrade our fellow-creatures, men and women, or live 
to raise them — stru2:2:les to which God is not indiffer- 
ent if we are, — may issue in a real belief that we are 
members one of another, and that every injury to one 
is an injury to the whole body. Then it will be found 
that refinement and grace are the property of no class, 
that they may be the inheritance of those who are as 
poor as Christ and His Apostles were : because tliey 
are human. So there will be discovered beneath all 
the politics of the P^arth, sustaining the order of each 
country, upholding the charity of each household, a City 
which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 
It must be for all kindreds and races ; therefore, with the 
sectarianism which rends Humanity asunder, with the 
Imperialism which would substitute for Universal Fel- 
lowship, a Universal Death, must it wage im})lacable 
war. Against these we pray as often as we ask that 
God's will mav be done in Earth as it is in Heaven, 



IV. 
BOOKS. 

. . . Some books exhibit very transparently what 
sort of a person he was who wrote them ; they show 
hiin to us. I think we shall find that there is the 
charm of the book, the worth of the book. . . . 
There is a man who writes, and, when you get ac- 
quainted with that man, you get acquainted with the 
book. It is no more a collection of letters and leaves : 
it is a friend. 

I always tell my pupils not to read cold, impartial 
biographies, but to study a man's life in the book of 
some one who loved him. 

# 

I do not know any one who makes us feel more than 
Milton does, the grandeur of the ends which we ought 
to keep always before us, and therefore our own petti- 
ness and want of courage in pursuing them. . . . 
I would rather converse with him as a friend than talk 

103 



104 FAITH AND ACTION. 

of him as a poet ; because then we put ourselves into 
a position to receive the best wisdom which he has to 
give us, and that wisdom helps to purge away what- 
ever dross is mingled with it ; whereas, if we merely 
contemplate him at a distance as a great genius, we 
shall receive some powerful influence from him, but 
shall not be in a condition to compare one thing that 
lie says to us with another. And to say the truth, I 
do not know what genius is, except it be that which 
begets some life in those who come in contact with it, 

which kindles some warmth in them. 

* 

Shakespeare has taught us not to choose out dainty 
bits of our own national records and to feed exclu- 
sively on them. He has shown us that any period, the 
most apparently flat and dull, the most turbulent and 
bewildering, contains its lesson and will give out that 
lesson if we deal fairly with it, and do not force it 

into conformity with our own notions. 

* 
* * 

"Whatever we may think of Shakespeare's Plays as 
guides to a knowledge of English History, I think 
most people will confess that they have learnt more 
about the different people who have acted in that his- 
tory from them than from any other source. The men 
and women whom he shows us are not names or shad- 
ows, but such as we at once recognize, such as we are 



BOOKS. 105 

sure must have been. . . . The titles of his plays 
are not chosen unfairly or by accident. He does not 
put King John, King Richard II., King Henry IV. in 
the front of the battle, and then exhibit to us some of 
the more striking events, or the more remarkable peo- 
ple of their times. The kings are the prominent fig- 
ures in the drama ; the others all stand in some relation 
to them. 

Do you remember what Charles Lamb says about 
his wanting a grace before Shakespeare and Milton as 
well as a grace before meat ? I am sure this is true if 
our books are not to choke us. 

Chaucer is the genuine specimen of an English poet 
— ■' a type of the best who were to come after him : 
with cordial affection for men and for nature : often 
tempted to coarseness, often yielding to his baser na- 
ture in his desire to enter into all the different expe- 
riences of men : apt through this desire, and through 
his hatred of what was insincere to say many things 
of which he had need to repent, and of which he did 
repent ; but never losing his loyalty to what was pure, 
his reverence for what was divine. 

Why is it that we like to read the poems of a man 
who has more of this feeling (susceptibility to the 



106 FAITH AND ACTION. 

beauties of Nature) then we have ourselves? Is it not 
because we look upon him as our spokesman ? He 
brings out something that was hidden in us — that we 
did not know was in us. He says what we should like 
to say if we could. He is, tlien, not a more special 
man than we are : he is more of a common man. The 
human sympathies have been more awakened in him 

than in us. 

* 

I do not believe that the interest which we have 
taken in Scott's poems, or Scott's novels, was owing 
chiefly to their exhibition of great knights and noble 
personages, tliough no doubt that has contributed to 
their fame. I believe the genial sympathy which he 
showed with the Scotch peoj^le, his Jeanie Deans and 
Edie Ochiltree, have been the real and permanent 
strength of his works. To these we turn with ever 
fresh pleasure ; and it is a consolation to reflect that so 
much genial sympathy could have existed in a man 
writing during the faded and artificial days of the 
Regency. 

. . . Thomas Fuller, one of the liveliest, and yet, 
in the inmost heart of him, one of the most serious 
writers one can meet with. . . . There is no one 
who is so resolute that we should treat him as a friend, 
and not as a solemn dictator. By some unexpected 



BOOKS. 107 

jest, or comical turn of expression, he disappoints 
your purpose of receiving his words as if they were 
fixed in print, and asserts his right to talk with you, 
and convey his subtle wisdom in his own quaint and 
peculiar dialect. 

I have always contended that Plato is quite as prac- 
tical as Aristotle : nay, that if he is rightly studied as 
he would have us study him, in connection with the 
life and purposes of Socrates, he is more practical. 
But I am sure that Aristotle has excellences of a verv 
high kind which Plato has not. 

Considerinoj that Aristotle is reckoned so o-reat a 
domuatist . . . it is marvellous how free he is 
from the temptations of the mere schoolman, how little 
he trusts in mere formulas, how every virtue of which 
he speaks is only a virtue as it becomes formed in a 
man. ... In this respect, the comparison of him 
with Plato, if it is greatly to his advantage, is for us 
most instructive. The Ilepuhlic teaches us how the 
noblest student of Humanity, in his eagerness to grasp 
the Universal, is likely to lose sight of the Particular. 
In Plato's vast Communism the Family is lost. Aris- 
totle acknowledges it as the very basis of political 
society : the relations of the household are the germs 
of the different forms of government. 



108 FAITH AND ACTION, 

* 

I have never taken up any dialogue of Plato without 
getting more from it than from any book not in the 
Bible. I do not think it signifies much where you 
begin. The attempts to systematise his writings seem 
to me in general, unfortunate ; his own beautiful and 
wonderful method is contained in each one and any 
one thoroughly studied is the initiation to the best. . 
. . Plato is the commentator on Plato, and it is a 
great mistake, I am sure, to fancy that anyone else 

can interpret him as well. 

# 
* ♦ 

. . . This is the Scripture, — not merely an in- 
spired book, as we sometimes call it, thinking to pay it 
great honor — but an actual discovery of God Himself 
and of His ways with His creatures. If we consider 
it only as a collection of ins})ired sentences or oracles, 
we may accept it as divine, but we shall gradually lose 
sight both of Him who is speaking in it, and of those 
by whom and to whom He is speaking; its godliness 
and its humanity will disappear together. We shall 
be coiilinually stumbling at one sentence or another, 
trviiig to force them into some strange meaning of our 
own. . . . If we take that other view of the Bible, 
— the errors, sins, false or imperfect judgments of 
its best and wisest men will be no scandals to us; we 
shall accept them as foils which enable us to see His 



BOOKS. 109 

character more clearly, in whom is light and no darkness 
at all. We shall perceive that men could only appre- 
hend truth just so far as they saw it in Him after 
whose image they were formed. Every step in the 
history will be a step into clearer illumination, God 
showing Himself more fully, that the thoughts and 
actions of men may be capable of a closer correspond- 
ence to His. At the same time, it will be no per- 
plexity to us, but an infinite comfort. , . . The 
Bible, so considered, becomes an orderly expanding 
history. 

The New Testament, I need scarcely tell you, is 
occupied from first to last — specially the Sermon on 
the Mount — in showing that acts are nothing except 
as they are fruits of a state, except as they indicate 
what the man is, that words are nothing except as they 
express a mind or purpose. 

The life of such a Jesus as Renan has described may 
be written by any one who has learning and artistic 
skill for the task. The Life of Christ can only be con- 
tained in a Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Sometimes we confound a revelation of God with a 
revelation of certain notions and opinions about God. 
Sometimes we think that a history of God's revelations 



110 FAITH AND ACTION. 

means a history of certain exceptional heroes. Either 
of these suppositions is in direct contradiction with 
the express language, with the inmost spirit, of the 
Bible. God promises to declare Himself to us that we 
may believe in Him, trust Him, love Him — not that 
we may hold a certain theory concerning Him. 

Some of the Histories that our age has produced are 
books in the truest sense of the word. . . . They 
Bhow us what a divine discipline has been at work to 
form men ; tliey teach us that there is such a discipline 
at work to form us into men. That is the test to 
which all books must at last be brought ; if they do 
not bear it their doom is fixed. They may be light or 
heavy, the penny sheet or the vast folio ; they may 
speak of things seen or unseen ; of Science or Art : 
. . . they may amuse us, or weary us, flatter us or 
scorn us ; if they do not assist to make us better and 
more substantial men, they are only providing fuel for 
a fire larger and more utterly destructive than that 
which consumed the Library of the Ptolemies. 

I am reading Froude's History with great interest 
and I hope some profit. After all, how nearly his view 
of Henry VHI. accords with that which Shakespeare 
got out of the Chronicles by mere intuition. I dare 
say it is in the main right. . . . His style is gen- 



BOOKS. Ill 

erally most delightful, far the best historical style for 
our times that I know, so equable, and free from pre- 
tension and jauntiness. 

* 

I am glad whenever my books are recognized as real 
messages by any who have known me. I wish they 
could always be taken as my efforts after truths which 
we all want equally, and which I might be better able 
to reach if I could hear all the doubts and objections 
which my stammering words raise in honest and ear- 
nest minds. They are a kind of fragmentary conver- 
sation with known or unknown listeners. 

If the newspajDers supply us with the material for 
thinking, they will do us good ; if we use them as sub- 
stitutes for thinking, they will destroy both our in- 
tellects and our characters. 

* 

All Greek myths and Greek songs have seemed to 
me very wonderful, not bringing freedom, but express- 
ing the aspiration for it ; showing a ladder set up on 
earth, though lost in the clouds, and reaching to 
Heaven. 

There is no Greek play and no Roman history which 
may not be connected with what is passing around us. 



112 FAITH AND ACTION. 

, . . The more you understand the speech as well 
as the thoughts of writers, the more you will find that 
they explain your speech and your thoughts. The 
more perplexities that entangle you in your practice 
will be cleared away. 

Our modern Socialist questions, wliich must press 
more and more upon us, will, I conceive, present them- 
selves to you again and again while you are busy with 
these ancients. And it is a grand thing to read news- 
papers by their light and them by the light of the 

newspapers. 

* 

Dr. Johnson said, and many have said after him, 
that the readinir of " Paradise Lost " is a task which 
people perform once and are glad never to resume. I 
do not wonder that this should be so. To have a book 
put into one's hands which one is told is very sublime, 
or devout, or sacred, or one of the great epics of the 
world, is to have a demand made on one's admiration 
to which we submit at first dutifully, and against 
which, in a little while, we feel an almost inevitable 
rebellion. ... It is quite otherwise, I believe, 
when we receive it as the deepest, most complete 
utterance of a human spirit; when it comes forth as 
the final expression of the thoughts of a man who has 
been fighting a hard battle, who appears to have been 



BOOKS. 113 

worsted in the battle, who thinks he has fallen on evil 
days and evil tongues. 

Milton appears to me greatest when he is on the 
ground of the Old Testament, com})aratively feeble 
when he ventures into the region of the Xew Testa- 
ment. He has been called, and not wrongly, our He- 
brew Poet. 

There is one English religious book, written by a 
man of the people, by one who had endured all possi- 
ble anticipations of future misery himself, the habits of 
whose school would have led him to press them as the 
most powerful motives on others. The genius of the 
book has been confessed by scholars: its power has 
been felt by peasants in this land, and in all lands into 
the language of which it has been translated, almost 
since it issued from the writer's gaol. To what is the 
I^ilgi^im's J^rogress indehted ior this influence? Cer- 
tainly to the strength with which the feeling of evil, 
as an actual load, too heavy to be borne, is brouglit 
home to its readers. It is the man groaning with the 
burden upon his back, whom rich and poor sympathize 
with, whom each recognizes as of his own kindred. 

Spenser, it seems to me, invented nothing ; he took 
that which he found lying idle and useless and unin- 



114 FAITH AND ACTION. 

telligible. He showed us what sense, and beauty, and 
harmony there lay beneath it, what help we may get 
from Fairyland, if we understand that Fairyland is 
about the noble, and the shopkeejDer, and the peasant ; 
that even in the midst of the city where he was born 
a poor man and died, perhaps for lack of bread, there 
is a way by which our spirits may ascend into it, may 
see its bright skies, and taste its fresh fountains; tliat 
everyone who seeks his armor there, may become as 
gentle a knight as he was who wore the Red Cross 
shield, may be able to vanquish as many giants and 
enchanters as any who went forth from the palace of 

Gloriana. 

# 

The treatise of JMilton on Education, . . . what- 
ever may be the merits or mistakes of the plan of 
study which it recommends, is one of the most sug- 
gestive books ever written, as it is one of the bravest 
and noblest ; a witness as all his other books are, that 
no man has di*unk more deeply into the spirit of our 
English institutions, if lie was over impatient of the 
forms, when tbe spirit as he thought, had departed 

from them. 

* 

It see^s to me that we have gone astray in the 
study of Scripture, not from excess of simplicity, but 
from excess of refinement, from looking to a distance 



BOOKS. 115 

for that which lies at our feet, from refusing to take 
words as they stand, and to believe that the waiters 
meant what they say they meant. 

The Bible itself forces us to ask a multitude of 
questions. Because I receive it as a revelation of God, 
I am bound to ask what it reveals concerning God. 
Because I receive it as a whole book, as a continuous 
revelation, I am bound to ask how one part of it ac- 
cords with and interprets another. We must not fear 
to make this demand. It is distrusting the Bible, dis- 
trusting God, to have such a fear. And, when we 
have not found the answer in any special instance, we 
should say so frankly. It cannot shake our faith to 
feel such ignorance and confess it. 

Looking at the best female literature of our own 
and former days, this, as it seems to me, has been its 
great function, to claim that all thought shall bear 
upon action, and express itself in action, that it shall 
not dwell apart in a region of its own. 

Dr. Arnold, in an admirable passage of his lectures, 
dwells upon the good which he had got from Mitford's 
" Greece," not because the sentiments of the historian 
were just, or his statements of facts always credible, 



116 FAITH AND ACTION. 

but because he wrote in a passion, because he de- 
nounced Pericles with the same vehemence with w^hich 
he would have denounced Mr. Fox. So Dr. Arnold 
learnt that Pericles was not less an actual person, not 
more a shadow, than Mr. Fox. . . . We have all 
had to bless some one or other for making us know 
that we are reading of men and women when we are 
readino: bound books. I think it is also Dr. Arnold 
who says that he owed much to the " Fortunes of 
Kiffel" for makins: him recollect that King James 
talked broad Scotch. That is the kind of benefit 
which we have most of us derived from Sir Walter 
Scott. If we cannot always assure ourselves that his 
kings and queens, even that his ordinary ladies and 
gentlemen, had hearts beneath their robes, we have at 
least had one great difficulty removed. They did walk 
and talk: they had slioes and liead-gear: they are not 
only to be found on coins. When we have got them 
80 far brought into the region of humanity, Shake- 
speare will show us what they were, as well as what 
they wore. 

A man should be an artist to write a biography as 
much as to write a romance : he will not make the 
story of a life intelligible if he has not some knowl- 
edge beyond what he derives from the mere statistics 
of it. 



BOOKS, 117 






We have here (in the Book of Job) what is at least 
meant to be a history of human experience. . . . 
Christendom has received the book in this sense. 
Doctors have taken pains to illustrate it, and have left 
it much as they found it. Plain suffering men have 
understood it with all its difficulties much better than 
the most simple tracts written expressly for their use. 
You will see bed-ridden women, just able to make out 
the letters of it, feeding on it, and finding themselves 
in it. You will hear men who regard our Theology as 
a miserable attempt to form a theory of the universe, 
expressing their delight in this one of our theological 
books, because it so nobly and triumphantly casts theo- ' 
ries of the universe to the ground. How it squares 
with our hypotheses they cannot imagine, but it cer- 
tainly answers to the testimony of their hearts. 






If we have real reverence for Scripture, and a firm 
belief in that which it declares, we shall never strain a 
single one of its words or phrases, or strain a single 
fact to make it fit them. Abstinence from such dis- 
honesty will assuredly bring its reward in clearer ap- 
prehensions of the whole record hereafter. 



* 
* * 



There is one memorable passage . . . which be- 
longs solely to St. Matthew. It is that which taught 



118 FAITH AND ACTION. 

St. Augustine the difference between the teaching of 
Christ and that of the best philosophers : " Come unto 
me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you restP The words are sufficiently beautiful if 
they stood alone, unconnected with the passage imme- 
diately preceding. . . . But Augustine can never 
have separated them from that sentence. The heavy 
burden on his soul was the sense of ignorance of God 
and of separation from Him. The philosophers could 
awaken this sense, but could not satisfy it when it was 
awakened. He who could say that He knew the 
Father, and was willing to reveal Him, could say, 
" Come unto me, J will yive you rest.'''' And He could 
'then call upon them to take His yoke, to work with 
Him in His Father's Kingdom, to become a son lowdy 
and obedient, as the Son was ; so to cast off the heavy 
oppression of pride and self-will. 

The special calling of St. Matthew seems to be, to 
show us the working of the divine j^ower and influence 
side by side, with the working of those powers and 
influences which counteract it, and the approach of a 
crisis which would distinguish and separate them. 
Thus the parable of the tares of the field is St. Mat- 
thew's. The leaven which the woman hid in three 
measures of meal, whicli recent commentators . . . 
have taken to indicate the mixture of an evil and cor- 



BOOKS. 119 

rupt principle with the pure seed in Christian life and 
doctrine, is also his. ... So that his comparisons 
seem especially to bear upon that complete working 
out of the mystery of good and the mystery of evil, 
which is indicated by the phrase, " end or accomplish- 
ment of the age." 

* # 
A kingship over nature, and over the minds and 
bodies of men, is brought out before us by St. Mat- 
thew ; a life-giving sympathy, an intercourse with the 
inner man, a human fellowship, grounded upon, not 
contradicting, the divine condescension and compas- 
sion, is what St. Luke, more than either of the other 
Evangelists, compels us to recognize. 

. . . The compilers of our Prayer-Book, living 
at the very time when Faith was the watchword of all 
])arties, thought it wise to introduce the season of 
Lent with a prayer and an epistle which declares that 
the tongues of men and of angels, the giving all our 
goods to feed the poor, the giving our bodies to be 
burnt, finally, the faith which removes mountains, 
without Charity, are nothing. This Love was to be 
the ground of all calls to repentance, conversion, hu- 
miliation, self-restraint ; this was to unfold gradually 
the Mystery of the Passion, and of the Resurrection, 



120 FAITH AXD ACTION. 

the mystery of Justification by Faith, of the New 
Life, of Christ's Asceosion and Priesthood, of the De- 
scent of the Spirit, of the Unity of the Church. This 
was to be the induction into the deepest mystery of 
all, the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
the Holy Ghost. If it is asked what human charity 
can have to do with the mysteries of the Godliead, the 
compilers of the Prayer-Book would have answered, 
"Certainly nothing at all if human charity is not the 
image and countermart of the Divine ; if there can be 
a charity in man . . . unless it was first in God, 
unless it be the nature and being of God. If He is 
Charity, . . . Charity will be the key to unlock 
the secrets of Divinity as well as of Humanity." 

I claim it as the first and noblest distinction of our 
Prayers, that they set out with assuming God to be a 
Father, and those that worship Him to be His chil- 
dren. They are written from beginning to end upon 
this assumption. ... It confronts you in the first 
words of the Service ; it is so glaring that you almost 
overlook it ; but the further you read, the more ear- 
nestly you meditate, the more truly you pray, the more 
certain you are that it is not only on the surface, but 
reveals the nature of the soil below. That God is 
actually related to us in His Son, is the doctrine which 
is the life of the Prayer-Book. 



BOOKS. 121 






If all Progress consists in the advancing further into 
light, and the scattering of mists which had obstructed 
it, the Bible contains the promise of such Progress^ a 
promise which has been most fulfilled when it has been 
most reverently listened to, when men have gone to it 
with the greatest confidence and hope. I complain of 
our modern religious world, not for cherishing this 
confidence or this hope, but for abandoning it and rob- 
bing others of it. If we come to the Bible as learners, 
it has more to teach us yet than we can ask or think. 
If we believe that we know all that is in it and merely 
resort to it for sentences and watchwords to confirm 
our own notions and to condemn our brethren, God 
will show us — He is showing us — how great the pun- 
ishment to us and our children must be, for abusing 
the unsjDeakably precious treasure with which He has 
endowed us. 



* 
* * 



. . . If we have sufficient reverence for the Book 
to follow in the steps which it marks out for us, we 
may learn something from it. We shall not learn, 
even then, if we forget that all true words — the truest, 
most of all — only speak to us, when they speak in us, 
when they awaken us to thought, self-questioning, 
wonder, hope. ... To imagine that any book, or 
any living voice can give, if there is not a receiver, or 



122 FAITH AND ACTION. 

that it can give except according to the measure of 
th.e receiver, is to contradict all experience and all 
reason. 

The Book of Psalms is the most wonderful book in 
the world, because it is the most universal ; because in 
it saints and seers and prophets and kings prove their 
title to their great names, by finding that they have a 
greater name still, — that they are men; that they are 
partakers in all the poverty, emptiness and sinfulness 
of their fellow-creatures; that there is nothing in 
themselves to boast of, or claim as their own ; that all 
which they have is His, wlio would have all to know 
Him and be partakers of His holiness. And, therefore, 
the fifty-first Psalm is, as it seems to me, the real ex- 
planation of all the Psalms. . . . 

* 

. . . St. John's is not, as some people may care- 
lessly imagine, difficult or unintelligible language. It 
is particularly clear and transparent. We may cloud 
it with our conceits, we may interpose a number of 
shadows, thrown from ourselves, between it and our 
consciences; but, if we will let it bear directly upon 
them, they will recognize its force, they will not wait 
to have it translated into that which is feebler and more 
fonnal. To some, the language of symbols may seem 



BOOKS. 123 

unsatisfactory; some may even denounce it as idola- 
trous and profane. . . . But if they will have the 
Bible, they must have symbols ; tliey must be content 
to let God speak to them through the forms of sense, 
because they are His forms, and because no others could 
convey His meaning to the hearts which He desires to 
take it in, so well as they do. 

* * 
The Ser^dce brings before us on the same day 

Psalms written in the most different states of mind, 
expressive of the most different feelings. If we have 
sympathized in one, it often seems a painful effort to 
join in the rest. And so it must, as long as we look 
upon prayers and jDraises as expressions of our moods, 
as long as we are not joining in them because we be- 
long to a family and count it our highest glory to lose 
ourselves in it and in Him who is the head of it. We 
must be educated into that knowledsfe. It mav be 
slow in coming, but till it comes, the Psalms are not 
intelligible to us; . . . we do not more tlian half 
enter into the parts of the service which we seem to 
enter into most. They touch certain cliords in our 
spirits, but not the most rich and musical chords : 
these do not belong to ourselves ; they are human ; 
they answer to the touch of that Divine Spirit who 
holds converse with the spirit of a man which is 
in us. 



124 FAITH AND ACTION. 

Our private solution (of Scrij^ture) may not be with- 
out its use ; it may point at one side of a great truth ; 
but if we idolize it, and set it up against every other, 
and search for no farther light, we shall find that we 
are ourselves claiming to be higher oracles than those 

which we profess to consider divine. 

# 

In one arrangement concerning these lessons, the 
comj)ilers of tlie Prayer-Book seem to me to have 
failetl in moral courage. . . . I do not see that 
they were justified in omitting the Apocalypse in their 
courses of Sunday or daily reading. Had they sur- 
rounded it with the solemnities of worship, had they 
taught us to read it like the other Scriptures, as if we 
were in God's presence, I cannot believe we should 
have dared to indulge in the fond trivialities which 
every commentator, almost every private individual, 
seems to think he may safely pour out on a book surely 
as grand and awful as any that exists in human lan- 
guage. 

* * 
No such word (as Christianity) is found in the New 

Testament. Surely we may be most thankful for the 
omission. For what a vague phrase it is ! How con- 
tinually it stands for a hundred different meanings, or 
does duty for a meaning that is absent altogether I It 



BOOKS. 125 

IS not Christianity of which the beloved Apostle and 
all the apostles speak to us ; it is Christ. It is not a 
collection of notions, habits, practices ; it is a Person. 

. . . Truths which the simjole and poor in spirit 
readily apprehend, but which our pride and vanity are 
perpetually robbing us of, have, I believe, been espe- 
cially brought home to the hearts of people by the 
Book of Psalms. Let a man hold his theory about the 
dictation of Scripture ever so strongly, it must break 
down with him when he begins to read that book, or 
at least in any manner to enter into the spirit of it. 
Is it possible, he must say to himself, that these prayers, 
these songs, these confessions of sin, were repeated in 
the ears of a man that he might write them down for 
the fjood of the world ? . . . Wherever the Psalm- 
ist learnt these words, they did come fresh and burn- 
ing from his heart ; they must ; or how could they go 
fresh and burning into other men's hearts? Is it diffi- 
cult to understand then, how they can have been ifi- 
spired^ how God can have been the author of them ? 
Difficult, truly, if Ave are determined to know what 
praying, and giving of thanks, and confessing are, 
without praying and giving of thanks and confessing. 
Difficult! say, rather, impossible! But, if we have 
ever tried to perform these acts, tried because we felt 
we could not live without them ; tried with this con- 



126 FAITU AND ACTION. 

viction, and yet been disappointed ; we do and shall 
learn that prayer, if it be man's utterance of his own 
wants to God, has yet its beginning and first spring in 

Him. 

* 

Every subject has so much to do with liistory, that 
every man who is devoted to any subject wliose busi- 
ness is mainly with that, has a point of affinity with all 
the transactions of his land. . . . Tlie artist, the 
tradesman, the student of physics, the soldier, may 
each claim his riglit in the history, may each bring his 
contribution to it. Beginning the study from his own 
topic, working at it for the sake of that, he finds him- 
self unawares in contact with the friends whose occu- 
pations are the most alien from his ; he is asking their 

help, they are asking his. 

* 
# * 

If I may judge of others by myself, it is not easy 
to express the magnitude of our obligations to Gibbon. 
"We become more conscious of them the more we en- 
deavor to put our thoughts together respecting the 
long period which he has described to us, or to con- 
sider particular portions of it. We are not only bound 
to admire his patient toil, his faithfulness in the study 
of documents which a large majority of his contempo- 
raries, and probably of ours, would suppose that he 
bad no occasion to meddle with, and the power which 



BOOKS. 127 

he has of awakening our interest in the dullest sub- 
jects. These are very great historical gifts ; but the 
historical genius is more exhibited when a writer en- 
ables us to understand that heterogeneous events are 
connected, that history is really a drama, every scene 
of which has relation to some centre, and is bearing us 
on to some issue. The melancholy grandeur of Gib- 
bon's book remains with us and grows deeper as we 
look upon any picture of the ruins of Rome, or medi- 
tate upon the world that has grown out of them. His 
solemn and stately style is felt . . . to be the 
proi)er garb for a funeral procession, such -as he brings 
before us, and compels us to join. It is a majestic 
spectacle to see Greeks and Goths, hordes from the 
steppes of Asia which Pompey and Cicero never 
dreamed of, the Moors of Africa, nations in all cos- 
tumes and of all religions, joining in that procession 
and attending the fallen conqueror to his tomb. 

It has not been a mistake, I believe, in our education, 
that we have busied ourselves so much with the lecjends 
of Greece and Rome. If we used them aright, they 
would not serve for the food of an idle dilettanteism — 
they would teach us reverence and fear. We should 
tremble as we remembered, " These dreams of a beauty 
which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, have visited 
the hearts of human beings generations ago : the dark 



128 FAITH AND ACTION. 

and filthy ima2;inations which mincjled with these 
dreams were engendered in the same hearts ; by one 
as much as the other, . . . we know that those 
hearts are Uke our own. They will dwell together in 
us, and in time the vile will seem real, the beautiful 
only a shadow, unless we can find that the beauty 
has been somewhere substantiated ; unless we can see 
the beauty apart from the corruption; unlcvss there is 
some power which can establish the one and destroy 
the other in ourselves." 

# * 
I cannot fall down and worshij) Nicholas V. or 

Lorenzo the Magnificent, or Leo X. I can as little 

bring myself to regret the revival of Latin scholarship 

and Greek art, or not to hail it as a very great stej) 

forwards in the divine and moral education of the 

West. I cannot think that a mej'c dilettanteism and 

refinement, which satisfied no one of the great national 

impulses that had been awakened in the fourteenth 

century, which did nothing whatever for the elevation 

of the mind of the people, which scorned the idea of 

liberty and popular life, which tolerated the basest 

intrigues and the darkest vices, which concealed them, 

apologizS for them, and allied itself with them ; I 

cannot conceive that this is a thing which brave men 

are bound to admire, or which they can dare to speak 

of, as if it had borne any great fruits for mankind. 



BOOKS. 129 

But on the other hand, I must think that this dilettante- 
ism, poor and contemptible in itself, was discovering, 
or at least polishing weapons that were destined to do 
miglity service for mankind, and partly by w^orking 
out its own destruction. Call the old literature Clas- 
sical or Pagan, or what you please, but it was a litera- 
ture that spoke of national life and energy, of politics 
that were based upon principles and not upon plots, 
of statesmen who w^ere first men, of states that were 
called into being b'y. a divine voice, and which asserted 
their origin by the vengeance and fall w^hich overtook 
the human rulers who supposed they could fashion the 
world at their pleasure. This literature, with all its 
corruptions, spoke more clearly and distinctly of do- 
mestic life as lying at the foundation of civil polity, 
than any monk, however high his ideal might be, had 
been able to sjDeak. 

Can we find no picture . . . which may teach 
us what the effect ujion a man would be if the Con- 
science were . . . reduced to the smallest possible 
force and vitality ? Modern literature ... is in 
this case most helpful. You know the story of Romola 
. . . and will remember therefore the full lenoth 
and admirable portrait of the young Greek Tito. 
With a perception of all sensual delights as exquisite 
as ever belonged to his race when it was in the fullness 



130 FAITH AND ACTION. 

of its glory, with the accomplishments which made it 
the teacher of AYestem Europe in the fifteenth cent- 
ury, with energy for all the intellectual pursuits which 
were so dear to the Italians of that day, failing in no 
subtlety of mind or grace of person, or aptitude for 
affairs, able to attract the admiration of the wisest 
statists, and to win the heart of the noblest woman, — 
what is there deficient in this man ? This only. The 
words " I ouGrht " and " I ouccht not " have vanished 
from a vocabulary rich in the spo^s of all languages, 
capable of expressing every delicate and refined appre- 
hension. 

# 
« * 

{Itomola) has impressed me very deeply. I think 
(George Eliot's) Savonarola is the true man. I have 
seldom been more moved than by some of her hints 
respecting him in the latter part of the story. And 
her Tito, with the exception of his melodramatic exit, 
seems to me admirable throughout. Nor can T agree 
with ]Miss Wedgwood in considering Romola a modem 
lady. I think she has the dignity and grace at least 
of the revived antiquity of her age. 

Whenever I read Macbeth with its blasted heath 
and its witcli scenery, I feel certain that the story is 
essentially true ; that no change of circumstances or of 
opinions has made it less real, less tremendous for out 



BOOKS. 131 

time than for the time in which it was composed. . 
Suo'o-estions do come to a man now as of old 

Co 

which he dallies Avith, which mix with dreams of ambi- 
tion that he has been secretly cherishing, which seem 
to gain a wonderful encouragement from unexpected 
events, which are deepened by some counsellor less 
scrupulous than himself. And then come the oppor- 
tunities for the crime. . . . Before it is done, the 
Conscience which has been resisted within presents 
itself in outward visible forms, the bloody dagger, the 
handle towards the hand which cannot be clutched. 
After it is done there rise before the imagination of 
the man ghastly figures which recall those whom he 
has put out of his way ; the phantoms of superstition 
must be laid by fresh acts which the former have made 
desirable. The superstitions do not cease with the 
dark deeds, they become more fixed, more intense. . 
. . That is an ower true tale for the reign of Vic- 
toria as well as for the reign of Elizabeth or of Duncan. 

Do you know Lord Byron's Manfred P Have you 
read that wonderful play of the Conscience? It has 
none of the variety of Macheth. Byron had not Shake- 
speare's power of making us see a number of different 
men, each distinct in himself, each acting on the thought 
and life of the others. The interest is concentrated in 
the hero. ... No one who reads it can believe it 



132 FAITH AND ACTION. 

to be a mere work of imagination. There is a burning 
individual exj^erience in every sentence. Count Man- 
fred has come of an ancient line. His castle is in the 
Alps. . . . He revels in the grand forms of Nature. 
But tliey have become, like everything else, an oppres- 
sion to him. There is on him the burden of a great 
crime. He has power over spirits. They are ready to 
do his bidding, to give him anything that he asks. He 
asks forgetfulness. That is the one thing they cannot 
give. . . . He is on the edge of a precipice. Why 
may he not throw himself over it? What if he did? 
Will the vision depart? A chamois hunter saves him 
and brinijs him to his castle. At leno-th the destined 
hour arrives. A priest visits him in bis dying Iiours, 
a kindly well-intentioned man willing to use his knowl- 
edge and the powers of his office for the good of Ids 
fellow-creature. It is in vain. What are subordinate 
agents to him? He is face to face with the powers of 
good and of evil. Which is the stronger? Which is 

to prevail ? 

* 

The strictly domestic story has become characteristic 
of our times, not in this country only, but . . . in 
all countries of Europe. . . . The Family may be 
merely a ground-plot for the display of sensational 
incidents. Still these incidents are found to be most 
startlinsr and therefore most asrreeable to those who 



BOOKS. 133 

wish to be startled, when they are associated with out- 
rages of one kind or another upon family order. 
Those who do not want sucli stimulants to their own 
feelings and fancies, and do not hold it an bonest trade 
to mix them for others, have found in the quietest 
home-life materials for Art. All social harmonies and 
social contradictions they see may come forth in the 
relations of fathers and children, husbands and wives, 
brothers and sisters, masters and servants. There is a 
certain character, they are sure, which helps to make a 
family peaceful or miserable — a home out of which 
blessings or curses may diffuse themselves over the 
commonwealth. ... I am entitled therefore to 
claim the authority of the most thoughtful, as well as 
the most popular authors, of all schools, and of both 
sexes, for the opinion that Domestic Morality is not 
only an integral portion of Social Morality, but should 
be the starting point of all discussions respecting it. 

* 

I do not think there is any kind of writing in our 
day which is so popular as what is called " the Analy- 
sis of human feelings and motives." I am not speak- 
ing of philosophical books ... I am thinking of 
newspa|)ers, magazines, novels. The greatest talent, 
so far as I know, wdiich is to be found in any of these, 
is exhibited, not in the invention of plots, not in that 



134 FAITH AND ACTION. 

which is properly the dramatist's art, the showing forth 
of persons in action, but in the careful dissection of 
their acts, and of the influences which contributed to 
the formation of their acts. . . . Though there is 
much delicacy of observation in all the more eminent 
Essayists of the last century, in the best of them a 
calmness which I am afraid we have almost lost — 
though a novelist like Fielding had a very remarkable 
insight into many of the deceptions which men prac- 
tise on themselves, as well as into some of their better 
impulses — yet in the peculiar kind of observations 
and criticisms to which I am referring, I doubt if they 
could bear comparison with several of our contempo- 
raries who in mere artislical gifts may be far inferior 
to them. Criticism is that of which our age boasts, 
and in which no doubt it excels. We are nothing, if 
not critical. 

(Fielding) w^as a Metropolitan Justice of the Peace ; 
he had known personally something of those who came 
before him in that capacity, much also of the life of 
ordinary citizens and country squires, of schoolmasters 
and clergymen. In them, as well as in the servants 
who waited upon them, and in the highwaymen w^ho 
were their terror, he discovered differefit exhibitions 
of character, different standards of behavior, different 



BOOKS. 135 

apprehensions of justice and injustice, of right and 
of wrong. In every class, there was evidently some 
standard ; in every one some apprehension of justice 
and injustice, of right and wrong. If these had been 
absent, the members of such classes could not have 
been represented in any story ; they would not have 
been subjects for a work of Art. The novelist does 
not pretend to try them by any canons of his ; but 
he makes us feel that they had their canons, and de- 
nounced acts which appeared to them a departure from 
their canons. 

I used to feel a little irritated when I read Mr. 
Thackeray's novels by his frequent interpellations of 
" Well, Sir, or Well, Madam, do you treat your servants 
or your neighbors any better than these gentlemen or 
ladies whom I am describing, treated theirs?" The 
repetition seemed to savor of mannerism; the writer 
appeared to be excusing offences which deserved con- 
demnation. I do not think so now. I believe Mr. 
Thackeray was aware of the temptation which there 
was in himself to forget the command, "Judge not 
that ye be not judged;" and felt that he should be 
doing his readers harm if he suffered them to forget it. 
He was trying honestly to correct a tendency which 
our age cherishes, and which the most deservedly 
popular talent may foster. 



136 FAITH AND ACTION. 

We ought to look upon books not as a collection of 
written letters, but as the utterances of living men ; if 
they are not, they are nothing. There may be much 
cruelty, often much baseness, in the exposures which 
are made of the ways and habits of authors who have 
not been in the least anxious to obtrude themselves 
upon the world, who have only wished to say some- 
thing which they thought they had to say. But on 
the whole it is good that a man should be recognized 
as a being, and not merely as a speaker; as having 
spoken something out of his own very self. At all 
events, for good or for evil it has come to pass that 
our discourses of every kind tend to assume a personal 
character. Our statesmen, soldiere, preachers, must 
either be photograj)hed, or sketched by an, artist who 
thinks he understands their features better than the 
sun does. To complain of that which one finds so 
much the habit of our time as this is useless and not 
very wise. We are a part of our time ; its ways are 
our ways : in finding fault with them, we are sure to 

be unconsciously finding fault with ourselves. 

# 

The novels of Scott, lover of feudalism as he was, 
showed a genuine unpatronizing sympathy with human 
nature in its humblest forms, of which it can scarcely 
be said that there were any clear traces in our litera- 



BOOKS. 137 

ture since the time of Shakespeare. Evidently the 
doctrine of the illustrious plowman of his land, " a 
man's a man for a' that," had taken possession of his 
mind ; courtly influences might weaken, but could not 
expel it. There were no doubt fashionable novelists 
who would gladly have restored the Chesterfield con- 
ception of life, and who had admiring readers in the 
middle class eager for what glimpses they could get 
about the doings of the hio-hest. Such ambition there 
will always be in a country like ours, and writers will- 
ing, perhaps more or less able to gratify it. But on 
the whole, the tendency has been in the other direc- 
tion. Those who have helped us to understand the 
forms of Society which are found under different con- 
ditions in all classes — of which we can in some meas- 
ure judge for ourselves — have exercised the greatest 
influence over us. Even a writer like Lord Byron, 
possessed by the feelings of his own order, not much 
honoring any other, was listened to, not chiefly on that 
account, but because he showed that beneath the arti- 
ficial surface of his circumstances and his character, 
there lay springs of terrible passion which belong to 

the kind, not the class. 

* 

I think a critical ao-e wants to be reminded that it is 
criticising itself; and critical men that tliey are criti- 
cising themselves. We are apt to forget that there is 



133 FAITH AND ACTION. 

a critic within us, a sterner, fairer judge than we are, 
who is taking account of what we do and speak and 
think ; who is now and then savins; to me when I am 
pouring out any righteous indignation against the 
robber of the ewe lamb, ..." Thou art the tnanP 
The Casuist is called to remind us of this fact. He 
must say to the critic, "Yes, this analysis of other 
men's acts and motives is wonderfully clever and acute. 
It may do those much good whom you desire to im- 
prove. But then am not T, are not you — conscious of 
something which is nearer than that man's acts and 
motives? You pronounce what he ought to have 
done, ayd not to have done. Is not that * ought' and 
'ought not' derived from a Conscience to which thou 
canst appeal in him, because it is in thee?" . . . 
When the critical temper is diffused through a land so 
that it affects all classes, all ages, both sexes, when it 
receives so much nourishment from all that we read, 
and all that we hear, it does seem well that this branch 
of our education should not be cast aside as if it had 
lost its meaning. No general Philosophy can supply 
the place of a personal Philosophy in an age which 
loves Pcrsonalitv so much as ours loves it. 



V. 

ART. 

One whole book of Plato's Hepuhlic is given to 
the subject of music as an instrument of education. 
He was but commenting on a pursuit which already 
formed a capital part of his country's discipline ; and 
he felt that portion of it to be so important for good 
and for evil . . . that a careful criticism of the 
kinds of music which were likely to nerve and elevate, 
or to weaken and lower the character, was not out of 
place in a work written to teach Athenians, Greeks, 
and men, the principles on which they must live to- 
gether, and the methods by which they might become 
practically united. 

. . . Even the vulgarest street music is an edu- 
cation to the hearts of those who stand at the doors of 
pestilential dwellings to listen to it. Till that day 
which shall unseal all pent-up words and reveal the 
secrets of all hearts, it may not be known what 
thoughts have been stirred up in human spirits by 

139 



140 FAITH AND ACTION, 

sounds which fell utterly dead upon our ears : what 
authentic tidings came to them through those channels 
when other avenues seemed to be closed ; what awaken- 
ings of conscience, what aspirations after truths, never 
' yet perceived, what search for treasures that had been 
lost. Some of the most beautiful passages of modern 
as of ancient poetry turn upon the stories of fishermen 
and shepherds who were tempted by siren visions, that 
gpoke to them of some fnirer regions, for which it 
were well to desert the dreariness of their earthly 
occupations, even at the risk of i)lunging into the 
deej). ... I feel that the beauty of such concep- 
tions lies in their essential tinith. The shepherds and 
fishermen of our land, as of every land, hear these 
whispers, have these dreams. They need an inter- 
preter : if they do not find one, they may give heed 
to any temj>ter who would lead them into the most 
perilous depths, or the most wretched shallows. The 
last calamity is the greater of the two. To have any 
gratification for such longings is almost better than to 
have them stifled and killed. 

If Music thus becomes a common language, it must 
have all the glory which those who have loved it best 
ami understood it mctfet liave felt to be in it. It must 
be deeper than our ordinary speech. However many 
may be the different forms which it has put on among 



ABT. 141 

different races, suitable to the tempers and habits of 
those races, it cannot be limited by these : it must be 
the sign that all are alike men : it must be the attempt 
— if as yet only an imperfect attempt — to express 
that which is human, that which binds us together. 

' I cannot disbelieve, though I may be utterly unable 
to comprehend it, anything which musicians have told 
us of the inner harmonies of which they ha^ie been 
made conscious. The beautiful sympathies, the clear 
pure lives of such men as Felix Mendelssohn, of such 
women as Mrs. Goldschmidt, should awaken in us 
much more than an admiration of them, though tliat 
may be most cordial. We should hail them as wit- 
nesses that those who have most of what is called 
musical acquirement, are those who most regard it as 
a bond to all their suffering brothers and sisters. "VYe 
should assure ourselves that every divine gift to indi- 
viduals is precious only as it unites them more with 
their kind. 

* * 

. . . You must put yourself in the place . . . 
of some simple clown, all whose work has been of 
the roughest kind, but who has had a father and 
mother, perhaps a wife and children, and who jjos- 
sesses the strange power, which it has never occurred 



142 FAITH AND ACTION. 

to him to think about, of recollecting that which has 
been in his own life, of anticipating that which shall 
be. ... I cannot tell what these strange sounds, 
so unlike the ordinary discourse which he hears when 
lie is talking about the weather, or buying and selling 
in the market, mean to him, what kind of message 
they carry to him *.. but I am quite sure it has some- 
thing to do with these memories and hopes and fears 
of his ; that it joins itself to a number of vague feel- 
ings wffich he has had about other days and about 
faces which he has seen, and hands which he has 
pressed ; that it gives them a kind of distinctness 
which they had not before. . . . The music speaks 
to something within him which the ordinary language 
docs not speak to, something more near his own very 
self, touching wires which that language does not 
reach, and making them vibrate. 

I know nothing of pre-Ilaphaelite controversies. . 
. . But if any persons say that we ought to look 
straight at Nature, hoping that in due time she will 
reveal her meaning to us, if it is ever so slow in com- 
ing, and that, in the meantime, we are not to antici- 
pate her lessons, or to put any of our notions or fan- 
cies into her by way of making her look j)rettier or 
more agreeable, this seems to me honest and true doc- 
trine. 



ABT. 143 



* 



I am sure the right way to admire any great work 
of art is to know it thoroughly, to let it speak to you, 
and not to be in a hurry to form any opinion about it. 
What you say about the religion of tlie old Catholic 
pictures and the difficulty of receiving it in our days, 
has much truth in it. I used to mourn at the thought 
and to be pained by it. Now it gives me hope. I look 
upon Protestantism as unfriendly to Art, favorable to 
Science. 






Science itself is becoming dynamical rather than 
mechanical: powers and agencies are discovered in 
nature itself, not less mysterious than those which 
miracle-workers spoke of. Man is able, through sci- 
ence, to exercise such powers as seem to attest the 
dominion of spirit over nature more completely than 
any signs they wrought. The victories of the old 
artist over the marble, the mysterious energy by which 
he compelled it to express the thoughts and emotions 
of living beings, are leading many whom these facts 
do not impress, in the same direction : the legends of 
Greece are received as striking commentaries on the 
powers of her sculptors and poets. The Romish 
priests, as teachers of youth, see that a movement is 
going on very like that which the popes rashly encour- 
aged at the revivM of letters. Some of them cry out 



144 FAITH AND ACTION. 

that it must be checked. ..." Let us banish the 
classics from our schools. The Greek leoends are cor- 
rupting our youth. They and profane art must be 
proscribed." . . , Many in Protestant England . 
. . would be ready to join them in their prohibitions. 
There are those among us who think that the facts of 
science, unless they are well sifted and sorted by re- 
ligious men and mixed with religious maxims, are 
likely to disturb the faith of the people, and that the 
beautiful forms of Greek sculpture . . . must 
corrupt their morals. . . . Our education in the 
Bible ought to have taught us to believe in a God of 
Truth — to reverence facts because they must.be His 
facts — to long that laws should be discovered because 
they are His. . . . Our Bible culture ought to 
have made us understand that nothing is impure save 
the corrupt and darkened conscience and will. . . . 
The breadth, simplicity, nakedness of the Scripture 
language should have taught us to dread what is dis- 
guised and dressed up for the purpose of concealment 
as immoral and dangerous — to regard the study of 
forms as they came from the Divine hand, with the 
beauty which He has impressed upon them, as safe 

and elevating. 

* 

The exquisite instinct of Rai)hael perceived at once 
the necessity of combining this event (the curing of 



ART. 145 

the epileptic boy) with the seemingly incongruous one 
of which we have just spoken (the Transfiguration). 
He felt that the unities of time and space w^ere both 
to be sacrificed for the sake of the deeper and more 
mysterious unity which all three Evangelists had per- 
ceived, and which had compelled them to exhibit the 
earthly crowd and faithless disciples at the bottom of 
the mount, as part of the same picture with the still 
and awful scene upon its summit. The painter, if he 
transgressed the formal rules of his art, will be ad- 
mitted, I should conceive, to have done so in submis- 
sion to a higher principle of art : not for the sake of a 
broad and glaring contrast, but that he might give a 
reality to our feeling of the Transfiguration, that he 
might connect it with ourselves, he made his daring 
experiment. All laws of art rest, I suppose, on some 
ground deeper than themselves which they indicate, 

but cannot touch. 

* 

The genius of Raphael has brought the vision of 
Ezekiel home to the imaginations, if not to the hearts 
of a number of cultivated men in all parts of Europe, 
who would not have cared to study the Prophet him- 
self. His picture is certainly worth a great many com- 
mentaries. And it has this especial merit : it justifies 
his own art from a charge which Protestants are often 
inclined, and not without much plausibility, to bring 



146 FAITH AND ACTION. 

against it. They complain that whenever it is applied 
to the highest subject of all, it must of necessity lower 
the idea of God, removing the thick cloud or the 
brightness into which no eye can look, and presenting 
some form which it is possible for us to apprehend and 
conceive. That theie is this peril in sacred painting 
it would be folly to deny ; that it may become the 
tool of the senses, and of sensual worship, experience 
has proved. . . . But the moral sense which is 
exercised to discern good and evil, may be trusted to 
pronounce a safe general verdict : the conscience of 
each man may warn him to avoid that which does him 
miscliief. . . . The painter, I think, may be a 
blessed help. . . . He may give us a total impression 
of the Divine awf ulness, of a glory that cannot be seen 
or uttered, and yet make us feel that a Man is in the 
midst of tlie throne, sustaining all things by the Word 
of his power. The spirit which rests in this belief, 
and is kept by it from sinking, will not be satisfied 
with any outward image or picture. It will recognize 
an unfathomable depth below ; but a de])th which we 
can only see through and in the Man of Sorrows, an 
abyss of love in which we can be content to be lost. 

In reading a famous poem, or in studying a work 
of art, it is far safer — it shows a far greater trust in 
the author — to confess to oui*selves what there is in 
him, which we have not learnt to admire, than to affect 



ART. 147 

a vague and general worship because we suppose we 
ought to pay it. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in a noble pas- 
sage of his Lectures, has enforced this duty upon his 
pui)ils, strengthening the exhortation by his own exam- 
ple. When lie first looked upon an Italian masterwork, 
he had honesty to own to himself that he did not see 
how it had deserved its great name. He waited for 
light and it came to him. If divines exercised the 
same wisdom — grounded on the same fidelity to the 
verdict of the conscience, and the same ti-ust that 
what is good will at last prove itself to be good — it 
is not to be told from how much uneasy scepticism 
respecting the facts and lessons of Scripture, from how 
much discontent, dangerous because suppressed, re- 
specting the ordinances and creeds of the Church, they 
would save their disciples. Oftentimes they would 
see the very same change gradually taking place in 
them which our great painter describes in himself. 
That which seemed to them tame, cold, ungenial in 
the Bible story, — vague, or too definite and formal in 
the words of the old Confession, — would come forth 
in its simplicity and power; . . . would compel 
the admiration which they had refused to counterfeit, 

sweeping aw^ay what opposed its entrance. 

* 

The face of man we call, and rightly call, the hu- 
man face divine. He who was the brightness of the 



148 FAITH AND ACTION. 

Father's glory had the face and features of a man. 
Painters have not been wrong in thinking that, though 
it was and must have been a face of sorrow, the sor- 
row, being the effect of intense sympathy, revealed 

the glory as nothing else could have revealed it. 

* 

St. John is sometimes called the Apostle of Love. 
That they might give us that impression of him, 
painters have chosen to rejiresent the last of the Apos- 
tles — who must have written all his books in his old 
age, perhaps in extreme old age — as a beardless youth 
with a delicate complexion and a feminine expression. 
I hope Mr. Kuskin has warned us . . . suffi- 
ciently of departures from fact, of false ideals, by 
whatsoever great names they may have been sanc- 
tioned. This mode of conceiving St. John, is espe- 
cially misleading and mischievous. Hitherto in this 
Epistle he has spoken much of righteousness; only 
once about men loving each other, and that in con- 
nection with keeping a commandment; only once 
about God's love to us, and that in connection with 
our doing righteousness. Plis language has been sim- 
ple and broad; not sentimental, at all. . . . His 
discoui-se . . . has been that of a man deeply 
ex]'>erienced, not in the least of one whose countenance 
was not furrowed by thought and sorrow. It has been 
that of one who has known temptations and has been 



ART. 149 

Ml 

out in rough weather, not in the least of one, who has 
kept himself from contact with evil lest it should 
spoil his innocence. 

No great man really does his work by imposing his 
maxims on his disciples; he evokes their life. Cor- 
reggio cries after gazing intently on a picture of Ra- 
pliael, " I too am a painter," not one who will imitate 
the great Master, but who will work a way for him- 
self. The teacher who is ever so poor in talent or 
information, but who is determined to speak out the 
convictions he has won, who is willing now and then 
to give some hint of the struggles through which he 
has won them, — leads one or another to say "I too 
am an Z." The pupil may become much wiser than 
his instructor, he may not accept his conclusions, but 
he wdll own, " You awakened me to be myself, for that 
I thank you." 






Painting, it will be said, is born and cradled amidst 
softer airs and more genial influences (than poetry ;) 
that at least requires patronage and leisure to foster it. 
Let us hear what testimony there is on this subject. 
I need not refer to any other authority, since I cannot 
refer to a higher, than Mrs. Jameson's "Memoirs of 
the Early Italian Painters." After pointing out the 
mistake into which many historians have fallen in 



150 FAITH AND ACTION. 

placing Cimabue at the head of the great revolution 
in art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Mrs. 
Jameson says that the great merit of that artist was 
in perceiving and protecting the talent of Giotto, 
"than whom no simple human beinff of whom we read 
has exercised in any particular department of science 
or art a more immediate, wide and lasting influence." 
And then she tells a story which has often been told 
before, but never in clearer or more agreeable language 
than this: — "About the year 1289, when Cimabue 
was already old and at the height of his fame, as he 
was riding in the valley of Perpignano, about fourteen 
miles from Florence, his attention was attracted by a 
boy who was herding sheep, and Mho, while his flocks 
were feeding around, seemed intently drawing on a 
fragment of slate, with a bit of pointed stone, the fig- 
ure of one of his sheep, as it was quietly grazing be- 
fore him. Cimabue rode up to him, and looking with 
astonishment at the performance of the untutored 
boy, asked him if he would go with him and learn. 
To which the boy replied that he was right willing if 
his father were content. The father, a herdsman of 
the valley, by name Bondone, being consulted, gladly 
consented to the wish of the noble stranger, and Giotto 
henceforth became the inmate and pupil of Cimabue." 
This story . . . goes much further, when it is 
connected with her remarks, than merely to prove, 



AET. 151 

what no one perhaps, would have doubted, that a shep- 
herd boy may become a great artist. It shows that 
the refinement and cultivation of a man like Cimabue, 
sprung from the upper classes of society, commanding 
all the appliances for his art which were within any 
man's reach in his time, and possessing himself the 
divine gift which could turn them to account, was not 
able to produce any deep and lasting impression upon 
the arts in Italy, till he had evoked the genius of this 
herdsman's son. ... I have been more anxious 
to speak of these Florentines, because it is to Flor- 
ence that the supporters of the doctrine, that leisure 
is the necessary and natural support of learning, com- 
monly turn with the greatest confidence and satisfac- 
tion. 

* 

If Raphael fell, as we are told he did, below elder 
painters in his standard of, devotion and holiness, I 
must think, without pretending to any knowledge of 
the subject, that he was not only more perfect tlian 
they were in his art, but that he did much more to 
raise the human and domestic affections, by exliibiting 
the purest model of them. I must think, also, that it 
was better and more for the honor of God, that men 
should study the human form as He made it, whether 
they derived the impulse to that study from the Greeks 
or from any other people, than that they should recon- 



152 FAITH AND ACTION. 

struct it accordino: to notions and fictions of tlieir own. 
Any passage out of tlie artificial to the living and the 
real, must, I conceive, have been a passage towards 
moral health and reformation. 

I do not know how many of you may have seen Mr. 
Holman Hunt's picture of the Awakened Conscience. 
Those who have seen it Mill not, I fancy, have forgot- 
ten it. . . . There are only two (fiirures) a man 
and a woman sitting in a somewhat gaudily furnished 
room beside a piano. His fingers are on the instru- 
ment. His face, which is reflected in a mirror, is 
Jiandsome and vacant, evidently that of a man about 
town who su])poses the brightest j)art of creation is 
intended to minister to his amusement. A music book 
on the floor is open at the words, " Oft in the stilly 
night." That tune has struck some chord in his com- 
j)anion''s heart. Her face of horror says what no lan- 
iruaije could sav, " That tune has told me of other 
days when I was not as I am now," The tune has 
done what the best rules that ever were devised could 
not do. It has brouijht a message from a father's 
house. 






* Twenty-five years ago, if half a dozen intelligent 
people acquainted with the tendencies, the strength, 

* Written in 1854. 



ART. 153 

the deficiencies of the Englisli character, liad been 
asked what studies would be . . . least likely to 
spread among us, especially among our manual workers, 
. . . they would have said one and all, " Whatever 
other instruction you give, leave the fine arts alone. 
They belong to the South. There they have ripened 
under the warm sunshine both of ecclesiastical and 
state patronage ; there men in the highest classes cul- 
tivate them, men in the lowest admire them. . . . 
Everything in the social condition of our people, in 
their hard practical temper, in their religious services, 
is hostile to this sort of cultivation." And if it oc- 
curred to any of the party, that possibly some un- 
washed Morland, or Blake or Gainsborough, might be 
dwelling in some unvisited corner of our land, a reluc- 
tant exception might perhaps have been made in favor 
of Drawing^ only that the testimony might be more 
strong against the possibility of 3IiisiG ever obtaining 
the slightest hold upon our people. How clearly it 
would have been explained to us, why voice and ear 
have been denied to the inhabitant of this island, and 
why, on the whole, we should rejoice in our freedom 
from the temptations to which they would expose us ! 
What a number of ingenious theories about races 
would have been introduced ! . . . And if these 
theories dwelt a little too strongly upon the effect of 
Italian sweetness and Roman Catholic worship, and so 



151 FAITH AND ACTION, 

left the fact unexplained that Protestant Germany, 
with anything but a soft tongue, anything but a warm 
devotion, had nevertheless, given birth to eminent 
composers, and to a peoj^le musically inclined, I need 
not tell any one who knows from experience the elas- 
ticity of these philosophical ex})lanations, how easily 
tliey would have expanded to take in this new and 
troublesome case — the speculative or mystical char- 
acter of Germany always coming in as a resource, to 
prevent us from building any vain hopes upon our 
community of blood. Well, it has appeared in the 
result, that these clear and irresistible reasonings be- 
lonj; to the same class with the solutions which the 
membere of the Royal Society, shortly after its foun- 
dation, sent in to the celebrated problem of Charles 
II. respecting the fish wluch did not displace the 
water. There was no problem to be solved ; the fact 
so well accounted for was not a fact. Of all experi- 
ments in English education, beyond comparison the 
most successful has been that for diffusing a knowl- 
edge of music and a love of music among our peoj)le. 

* 

Music will never, surely, occupy a most conspicuous 
place in any good scheme of education. But if it has 
taken stronger hold of those whom we desire to edu- 
cate, than any other study lias done, especially if it 
has laid hold of them when we thought that any other 



ART. 155 

study was more in agreement with their previous 
tastes and habits of mind, there must be sometliing in 
it whicli may help us to understand what is needed in 
all studies, something which may deepen and widen 
our thoughts respecting the nature of education itself. 



VL 

DUTY. 

Our instruments, our hands, our hearts, are given us 
to work with in this time, to struggle with the evil, to 
bring out the good, in this time, in order that people 
may look back in after days, and say, " See what has 
come down to us from it ; see what good has removed 
all the wrong which those who dwelt in it tell us of; 
see what there is in it to imitate." 

* 

IIow strongly I am convinced that we spend half 
our time in thinhing of faith, hope and love, instead 
of in believing, hoping and loving! How utterly we 
forget that the very meaning of the words implies that 
we should forget ourselves, and themselves (the acts, I 
mean,) in the objects to which they refer. 



* # 



You are sure to go wrong if you tie yourself by arti- 
ficial rules, and ask whether this or that act falls witli- 
in the letter of them, instead of considerin<r what it 
is that we expect from others, and therefore what it is 
that we ouG^ht to cfive them. 



156 



DUTY, 157 



* 

^ * 



I dream sometimes of times when one might have 
more inward and less outward business ; but after forty- 
years' experience I find that the inward is not better in 
my case, but worse for want of the outward, and that 
I really seek God most when I need His help to enable 
me to do what He has set me to do. 






There is the lesson to us that each man has his ap- 
pointed work to do, that more than that work he can- 
not do ; that, if he does it as ever in his great Task- 
master's eye, the times to come may bless his memory 
and give thanks for his wisdom. 






It seems to me that what we want is not a repudia- 
tion of service as inhuman, but a much profounder 
reverence for it : not an assertion that all have a rio-ht 
to rule, but far rather a conviction that every one is 
bound to serve, and may claim service as his highest 
privilege. 






. . . Everyone of us is a servant or minister 
in this kingdom. Some of us have the name of Min- 
isters. That is not that we may be separate from 
our fellows, but that we may give them a sign what 
Christ would have them be. All of us are ministers. 
Every father is a minister of Christ to his children. 



158 FAITH AXD ACTION. 

Every mother is a minister of Christ to her children. 
. . . Wherever we are going, whatever we are 
doing, we are ministers of Christ. That is our calling. 
We may be faithful or unfaithful ministers ; but He is 
our Master, and He has set us to wait upon some 
or other, upon more or fewer. 

We have fallen into the notion that we shall work 
more energetically with our hands and with our brains 
because we are continually fretting ourselves about 
what will come of our work, what pence or praise we 
shall get by it. And yet every one of us knows in 
his heart that this fretting destroys the honesty of his 
work and the effects of his work. If we could be 
free from this perpetual fever, if we could work from 
an internal impulse, not under the pressure of external 
motives — if we could work as freemen, not as galley 
slaves — what a difference it would make to the health 
of our bodies and of our spirits, and to all our influ- 
ence upon Society ! 

* * 
As Nature, with her old mosses and her new spring 

foliage, hides the ruins which man has made, and gives 
to the fallen tower and broken cloister, a beauty 
scarcely less than that which belonged to them in their 
prime, — so human love may be at work too, " soften- 
ing and concealing and busy with her hand in healing " 



DUTY. 159 

the rents which have been made in God's nobler tem- 
ple, the habitation of His own spirit. 

. . . What is it to serve the covetous g-od? It 
is this. If I am fretful and anxious about what I shall 
eat and drink, and how I shall be clothed, I fancy that 
I am his subject. I act as if he, this grudging, cov- 
etous god, were my master. And what is it to serve 
the Father in Heaven ? If I work without fear or 
anxiety, believing that there is one over me who knows 
what I am doing, and takes an interest in it, and de- 
sires that my work should be healthy and profitable, 
then I am serving my Father in Heaven; then I am 
acting as if He were my Master. 

Every act of mercy which our higher science is able 
to accomplish for sufferers from sickness, becomes a 
witness for God ; so the work of every magistrate be- 
comes a witness for Him equally : so commerce as it 
extends the bonds of fellowship between lands, and 
shows how one can give what another lacks, bears a 

witness no less mighty and effectual. 

* 

The harder a man works, the more he learns that he 
cannot let his thoughts go astray. They must be fixed 
somewhere. They must be turned to some one who 
will show him how he must pursue his business heartily, 



160 FAITH AND ACTION. 

not lazily, honestly, and not like a rogue ; as a freeman, 
not as a slave. Abide in this Lord of your hearts; 
set your heart ujDon Him, and you will get this help.- 

I would have all laymen feel that they are called by 
God to their different oflSces, but I do not think they 
will feel it if we (clergymen) do not feel our call more 
distinctly, and assert it against all doubts in our own 
minds and apparent contradictions from without. We 

are called and we may believe that we are. 

* 

. . . If (God) shows me any way in which I can 
lawfully give help, I think I shall not be slow to take 
it. ... I hope it is not altogether cowardice, 
though I may have a great leaven of it, which makes 
me tremble to run where I am not sent or have no 
message. I know God is working; if I may work 
with Ilim, it is a blessing unspeakable ; but to let His 
workincf bv mine is terrible. 

Every one of you will be called to some position in 
w^hich he will be both Serv^ant and Master, in whicli 
he will be under Authority, in which he will have 
some under his authority. What your lives shall be, 
what good or mischief you will do to your country, — 
will depend mainly upon the question how you under- 
stand this position, what you suppose to be the nature 



DUTY. 161 

of this authority. Just so far as you forget that the 
position involves a relation, just so far as you confound 
the Authority with Dominion, your manners will be- 
come brutalized, just so far you will help to brutalize 
all with whom in any capacity you are associated. . 
. . By oar fruits we shall be known and judged. 
By our conduct to Servants it will be shown whether 
we are fit to be Masters, or whether we must sink 
into Servants of Servants. 

The recollection of Liberty, the hope of Liberty, 
may come to any, as Epictetus said, who find that 
there is a stronger force within than the likings and 
impressions which fasten themselves to outside things. 
The Conscience is bidding each of us seek for that 
liberty ; we cannot be content till we have found it. 

* , 

Let no one persuade you that the great teachers of 
former ages must be cast aside in order that you may 
profit by the wider experiences of your own day. If 
you despise them, those wdder experiences wdll be no 
experiences for you ; you will carry away a multitude 
of notions from a multitude of schools ; each will trip 
up the other and make it useless for you. Tliese 
winters, if you use tliem rightly, wdll show you the 
worthlessness of mere notions, the impossibility of 
separating Morality from Life. Mr. Buckle repeats 



162 FAITH AND ACTION, 

the words, " As you would that men should do unto 
you, do ye also to them likewise," and asks tiiumi)h- 
antly what they have effected for mankind ? Speak- 
ing according to the lessons of the book in which they 
occur, I should answer, "Nothing whatever if they are 
regarded as mere words in a book ; woree than nothing 
if they are taken as warrants for self-exaltation, as 
reasons for exalting ourselves as Christians above 
other men." 

* * 

. . . I have sometimes thought I might be of use 
in warning those for whom I feel a deep and strong 
interest against a tendency which I feel in myself, and 
which I have seen producing most melancholy effects. 
I mean a tendency to be quick-sighted in detecting all 
errors in the schemes of other men and to set up their 
own in opposition to them. 

* * 

Only let us each work in the calling whereto God 

has called us, and ask Him to teach us what it is, and 

w^e shall understand one another and work together. 

* 
* * 

I have a very strong feeling of the duty of testify- 
ing for the name and kingdom of God ; a very deep 
conviction that Protestants and Romanists alike are 
setting up a religion in place of God. ... I feel 



DUTY. 163 

that if ever I do the work which I am sent into the 
work to do, I must more earnestly call upon the Church 
to believe in God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. 

We may appeal to men by the terrors of a future 
state ; we may use all the machinery of revivalists to 
awaken them to a concern for their souls : we may 
produce in that way a class of religious men who pur- 
sue an object which other men do not pursue (scarcely 
a less selfish, often not a less outward object) — who 
leave the world to take its own course, who, when 
they mingle in it, as in time they must do for the sake 
of business and gain, adopt again its maxims, and be- 
come less righteous than other men in common affairs, 
because they consider religion too fine a thing to be 
brought from the clouds to the earth. . . . But 
we must speak again the ancient language that God 
has made a covenant with the nation, and that all citi- 
zens are subjects of an unseen and righteous King, if 
we would have a hearty, inward repentance, which will 
really bring us back to God : . . . which will go 
down to the roots of our life, changing it from a self- 
seeking life to a life of humility and love and cheerful 
obedience ; which will bear fruit upwards, giving no- 
bleness to our policy and literature and art, to the 
daily routine of what we shall no more dare to call 
our secular existence. 



164 FAITH AND ACTION. 

" What shall we have therefore ? " was the thought 
of the Apostle, as well as of the ruler. " Everything," 
is the answer, "gifts beyond your imagination; but 
this is the greatest : To understand that your calling 
and your work are themselves inconceivable blessings, 
and that the blessing which follows upon them, the 
hire at the end of tlie day, is one of which you are 
not to be possessors, but sharers. If you look upon it 
as somethinof which vou are to 'have,' and from whicli 
others are to be excluded for your sake, you will never 
know what it is." . . . To be like Ilim, to enter 
into His mind, is the good : tliis is what the chosen 
seek : those who fancy themselves chosen to the injury 
of their brethren are only called. What a lesson to 
the elect nation ! What a deeper, more awful lesson 
to the elect Church ! 

As it was Christ in Paul who was suffering and 
striving for the Church — the object of his instruction, 
of his suffering, of his Gospel, was to make each Gen- 
tile, each man, know that Christ was in him, the very 
Christ who was in his brother : therefore, that he was 
not to exalt himself above liis brother, was not to 
dream of high mystical flights and raptures, by which 
he might scale heaven, but in toiling, suffering, teach- 
ing, was to enter into the loving mind of his Lord. 



DUTY. 165 






We have seen that sacrifice infers more than the 
giving up of a thing. We shall have to ask how the 
person who presents it may be enabled to give up him- 
self, and into what errors he may fall in his effort to 
do so. We liave seen that sacrifice has something to 
do with sin, somethino; to do with thankss-ivins:. . . 
. We liave seen that sacrifice is offered by man, and 
yet that the sacrifice becomes evil and unmoral, when 
the man attaches any value to his own act, and does 
not attribute the whole worth of it to God. It will be 
our duty to ask, how it is f)ossible that man should 
present the sacrifice, of which God is at once the 
Author and the Acceptor. 






The Kingdom of God begins within, but it is to 
make itself manifest without. It is to penetrate the 
feelings, habits, thoughts, words, acts, of him who is 
the subject of it. At last, it is to penetrate our whole 
social existence, to mould all things according to its 
laws. 






Is it easy to do the commonest acts, . . . as if 
they were not our own, as if we were to carry out in 
them the mind and will of another? Is it ea^ to 
know how these common acts ought to be done, so 
that they shall bring blessings and not misery, light 



166 FAITH AND ACTION. 

and not darkness, to our fellow-men ? If we are hon- 
est, we shall not talk so proudly and contemptuously 
about mere duties and the great principle of faith. 

. . . We may be very slow in listening to calls 
of duty, and the reason may be that we regard Him 
w^ho calls us as an Exactor, not a Giver. I press this 
confession before all others . . . because I believe 
we, the ministers of God, are more bound to make it 
than other men. We have thought, it seems to me, 
that our chief business was to persuade and conjure 
and argue and fiighten men into a notion and feeling 
of their responsibilities ; whereas our chief business is, 
assuredly, to proclaim the name of God ; to set that 
before our fellow-creatures in its fulness and reality ; 
so to convince them of their sin ; so to teach them 
how they may be delivered from it. . . . We have 
not dared to speak of God broadly, simply, absolutely, 
as a Giver, lest we should thereby weaken His claim 
upon man's obedience ; whereas this is His claim upon 
their obedience. . . . Thus we have begotten in 
men a feeling that they are obliged to do something 
which they cannot do. . . . If we dared to look 
upon God as a Giver in the full, free, intelligible sense 
of yie words, we should, in asking for bread, feel that 
we were asking for the j^ower and energy wherewith 
to work for it. 



DUTY. 167 



# 



Your business is to trust the risen Lord with your 
secret hearts ; to be believing in His perfect righteous- 
ness, and by faith to be clothing yourselves with His 
nature. Your business is to be fighting, as your fore- 
fathers fought, against all the temptations to distrust, 
cowardice, baseness, which are besetting you on every 
side. . . . By simplest acts of daily obedience, by 
continual efforts to be true, to speak truth, to follow 
truth, you are to prove that Christ's word is speaking 
to you, speaking in you : you are to show forth His 
risen life. 






Till we understand that there is somethinsc due from 
us, till the sense of duty is awakened, we have no free- 
dom, we are not even in the way to become men. 

We are to be, as John the Baptist was, preachers of 
Rej^entance. We are to preach, like him, of a Bap- 
tism for the Remission of Sins. We are to preach, 
like him, of a coming day of the Lord. And all this 
the least of us may do, as he could not do it, provided 
we remember what Baptism we and our hearers have 
received ; provided we have some slight, some growing 
impression of the Name into which we are baptized. 
That remembrance and that impression must make us 
feel as John the Baptist felt — that the position of 



168 FAITH AND ACTION. 

men brought into covenant and communion with God 
is a grand one, involving great responsibilities. Like 
him, we must exhort men to confess — we must con- 
fess — how little we have remembered, how ill we have 
acquitted ourselves of, those responsibilities. In en- 
couraging our hearers, one and all, to this confession, 
we may know, as surely as John did, that we are 
speaking as God would have us speak, — that we are 
speaking His words, not ours. . . . But we shall 
know also, what John could know very imperfectly, 
that every call to Repentance is a message from a 
Father, coming down to us through a Son, made effect- 
ual for us by a Spirit. 

What danirer that the well-beinoj of hundreds of mil- 
lions may be less dear to us than the triumph of a 
party, — nay, that we may make grand sentences about 
the hundreds of millions into mere tools for working 
out our own beggarly and selfish triumphs ! What 
probability that, not grand philanthropy only, but pri- 
vate friendship, once most cordial, — love, once pas- 
sionate and deep — may become chilled ... by 
petty jealousies and suspicions. And yet more peril- 
ous still are those warm religious emotions which seem 
to carry the very pledge and seal of eternity in them. 
. . . How many arts will a man be tempted to use 
that he may persuade himself they are not changed ! 



Burr. 169 

. . . How at last he may cast aside all faith, de- 
claring that he knows it to be a delusion, and that he 
would save others, if he could from the imposture to 
which he has yielded ! Where was his original mis- 
take ? What is the original falsehood of all who speak 
of their love to God and man? This: they take 
credit to themselves for a love which is moving thera 
to noble thoughts and good deeds, but which has 
another source than their hearts ; which is divine, not 
earthly : universal, not partial. How may they be 
saved from casting o££ all that is true in them, when 
they discover that they have been false ? By frankly 
confessing that falsehood to the Sj^irit of Truth who 
is convincinoj them of it. 

# 

. . . A very awful obligation is laid upon us by 
the claims and boasts which we put forward to be 
specially tolerant and merciful and charitable. I say 
that to make such pretensions and not to fulfil tliem, 
or only to fulfil them by a lazy indulgence which per- 
mits any kind of wrong in others, which stii*s up no 
life or energy in us, is to place ourselves far below the 
crudest fanatics who had in them some zeal for human 
beings as well as for God, however it might be per- 
verted by their selfishness and pride. But I say also 
that God would not allow us even to dream of such 
an honor for ourselves as the use of these titles and of 



170 FAITH AND ACTION. 

these boasts (as Cliristians) implies, if He did not wish 
us to have the dream turned into a reality. "We may- 
have more charity, a deeper charity than we have 
aspired to when our aspirations have been the grand- 
est. For we may abandon the thought of having a 
cliarity or love of our own, and so may be perfected 
in love. We may yield ourselves to that love which 
passes knowledge, that love which is a consuming fire 
to destroy the grovelling petty desires, the party spirit, 
the self-seeking that have made us a world of sects, 
instead of a Church of brothers. 

If we do not hate that which is contrary to love — 
that which is contrary to the nature of God — we can- 
not truly and earnestly love. ... I know that 
there is always a danger of the hatred which we ought 
to cherish in our heart of hearts against everything 
which is cowardly, base, insincere, unlovely, passing 
into that hatred of men which is a breach of the com- 
mandment ; yes, the danger often seems to be greatest 
in the strongest, most earnest minds. . . , No 
doubt this was a temptation of reformers in other 
days. They launched forth their denunciations against 
men, some of whom we cannot help regarding with 
respect and affection. . . . God give us their 
zeal, for their zeal was all good and loving! God 
teach us not to judge their fierce words, though we 



DUTY, m 

may not imitate them, though we may sometimes 
lament them! For we should ask ourselves very 
seriously whether our calm, measured, demure phrases 
may not conceal more scorn that is meant to wound 
the heart of the man we are censuring . . . than 
those which we call them bigots and savages for utter- 
ing; just because we do not loathe. the essential evil 
as they did, because we do not care so much for the 
essential good. This self-inquiry is, as I have hinted 
already, th^ true way to a distinction between a hatred 
of principles and a hatred of persons. To see the 
evil, first of all, in our own acts, in our own selves ; 
to recognize it as marring our sincerity and worth 
— as degrading us from the level God intends for us — 
this is a security which we can obtain in no other way 

for our loving the man whose wrong doings we hate. 

* 

It is a comfort, an infinite comfort, to think that no 
divine word which goes out of our lips, is dependent 
for its truth, or even for its success, upon the purity 
of the lips, upon the right will or heart of the speaker. 
It is a comfort beyond all comfort to believe that the 
Will, the Heai-t, from which the good news has first 
proceeded, are without variableness, or the least shadow 
of turning. It is a comfort, in this sense, to feel that 
we are officials, open to the same charges and just 
charges of coldness and deadness as all others who 



172 FAITH AND ACTION. 

bear that name. But may we not ask of those who 
hear as the one greatest sign ... of the thank- 
fulness to God for anything that has entered into them 
and borne fruit, that they will desire this blessing for 
their teachers, that they may be good stewards of the 
manifold gifts of God: stewards, I mean, who have 
not merely a dispensation committed to them, but who 
respond to the mind and will of Him who has com- 
mitted it, whose spirits are quickened and actuated 
continually by His Spirit ? Then I think, we — ceas- 
ing to be mere officials, and yet more tlian ever feeling 
that there can be nothing more blessed and glorious 
than duty, because He who exacts duty is Himself the 
source of all loving sympathy and affection, . . . 
shall be better able to help all classes and conditions 

of men. 

* 

The sense of duty draws all its strength and nour- 
ishment from the acknowledgment of a God who never 
acts from caprice or self-will, who governs all tilings 
in heaven and earth according to the order which He 
has imposed upon them, who seeks to bring all volun- 
tarv Vjeinijs into an understanding of His order and 
into cheerful consent with it. Obedience and freedom 
embrace each other when we believe that He asks us 
to yield up our wills as sacrifices to His who has first 
made tlio great sacrifice for us, who in that sacrifice 



DUTY. 173 

has united us to Himself. Then no office can be 
looked upon as anything less than a calling: in the 
highest and in the lowest Christ's own voice is saying, 
" Follow me." 

Any Christian man who takes his stand upon the 
same ground of unity in the Church whereof Christ is 
the Head, who acts consistently with that position, 
fulfilling tlie office to which he is called, and not seek- 
ing some other to please himself, may become a witness 
in every land to which he goes of the fellowsliip into 
which his baptism has brought him ; may in his words 
or life expound the principle of this fellowship ; may 
show how universal its privileges are, and how each 
may for himself partake of them. But I know there 
must be many on whom tlie often-repeated words, 
" There are heatliens at our doors, we ourselves are 
half heathens; leave Buddhists and Mahometans till 
you have provided for these," will have an effect suffi- 
cient to destroy their interest in all such exhortations. 
. . . A faith which boasts to be for humanity can- 
not test its strength unless it is content to deal with 
men in all possible conditions. If it limits itself to 
England, it will adapt itself to the habits and fashions 
and prejudices of England, of England, too, in a par- 
ticular age. But doing this, it will never reach the 
hearts of Englishmen. You say, "Try your Chris- 



174 FAITH AXD ACTIOX. 

tianity upon the cotton-spiniiers of Manchester, upon 
the hardware men of Birmingham ; if it fail with 
them, do you expect it will succeed in Persia and 
Thibet ? " We know it will fail, it must fail, in Birm- 
ingham and Manchester, if it addresses the people in 
those places merely as spinners and workers in hard- 
ware. This has been the mistake we have continually 
made. We have looked upon these "hands" as cre- 
ated to work for us; we have asked for a religion 
wliich should keep the " liands " in the state in which 
they will do most work and give the least trouble. 
But it is found that they are men who use these hands; 
and that which is a reliiiion for hands is not one for 
men. Therefore it becomes more evident every day 
that there is a demand in Manchester and Birmingham 
for that which, till we understand human beings better, 
we cannot supply. To acquire that understanding, w^e 
need not grudge a journey to Persia or Thibet; we 
need not think it an idle task to inquire what people 
want who are not called to sj)in cotton, or work in 
hardware, but who are creatures of the same kind 

with those who do. 

* 

Buddhism, then, like Hindooism and Mahometanism, 
has its lesson for us. We are debtors to all these in a 
double sense. Nor, I think, is it otherwise with those 
modern infidels whose olijections 1 have been consider- 



DUTY. 175 

ing. . . . Our obligations to them are not slight 
if they have been sent to break down a low grovelling 
notion we had formed of our own position and work. 
. . . We owe them the deepest gratitude if they 
have led us to ask ourselves whether there is any faith, 
and what kind of faith it is, w^hich must belong, not 
to races or nations, but to mankind; still more, if 
they have forced us to the conclusion that the real 
test, whether there be such a faith, and whether it has 
been made known to us, must be action, not argument; 
that if it exist, it must show that it exists. 

That word " Conscience " is one on which we cannot 
meditate too earnestly. You should consider it along 
with the adjective " conscious. '''' You should consider 
what you mean w^hen you say " I am conscious " of 
something. You should remember that it is derived 
from two words signifying " to know," and " together 
with." You must see that it implies that you know or 
take account of something which is passing within 
your own self. It leads us into this deeply solemn 
thouglit that a man can not only perceive the things 
that are without him, but that he has eyes within and 
that there is a whole world for him there to contem- 
plate. But this is an appalling reflection if we do not 
pursue the thought higher, if we do not ascend from 
the word " consciousness " to the word " Conscience," 



176 FAITH AND ACTION. 

if we do not reflect that it is not our own voice merely 
that is speaking within, but the voice of another, the 
perfect Teacher, Reprover, Guide ; and, if we do not 
believe that it is possible to ascend from the conscience 
of His presence into communion with His character 
and will. 

" What would become of us," it has been asked, " if 
each soldier felt himself^ to be an I ; said for himself, 
'I ought and I ought not?' My answer is this, I 
know not what would have become of us in any great 
crisis if this personal feeling had 7iot been awakened ; 
if every man had not felt that he was expected to do 
bis duty ; if duty had been understood by each sailor 
or soldier ... as the dread of punishment ; if 
the captain who asked for obedience had been just the 
person towards whom that slavish dread was most 
directed. Unless the obedience of our sailors and 
soldiers had been diametrically the reverse of that 
sentiment ... I believe there is not a regiment 
which would not have turned its back in the day of 
battle, not a ship which would not have struck its flag. 
The charm of the captain's eye and voice, of his exam- 
ple and his sympathy, this, as all witnesses whose testi- 
mony is worth anything have declared, has had an 
electrical influence upon hosts which could enable 
them to face punishments from enemies considerably 



DUTY, 177 

more terrible than any which the most savage venge- 
ance could devise for desertion. It is not the thought 
of what a majority will say or do that can stir any 
individual man to stand where he is put and die. It 
is that he has been aroused to the conviction, "I am 
here, and here I ought to be." 

. . . The Scripture . . . represents all intel- 
lectual gifts as bestowed, not to raise one man above 
another, but simply that men may be enabled to sei-ve 
each other. The highest of all is the servant of all. 
He who holds his gifts under this condition, and con- 
fesses his unfitness for the use of them, is a fellow- 
worker with the Divine Spirit. He is doing that which 
he is sent here to do. 

Chan ore . . . the longr word Oblisfation into the 
shorter homelier word Duty. . • . The mother 
tongue is always sweeter, often more distinct and defi- 
nite, than the tongue of philosophei-s. Happily when 
we speak of pei-sons, we cannot forget the affections 
which we have for them. . . . But there is a dan- 
ger of treating those affections as if they created the 
Order which calls for them. If we fall into that mis- 
take, the affections will become merely a part of our 
pleasures or pains. As long as we like a person, we 
shall suppose we are bound to him; our dislike will 



178 FAITH AND ACTION. 

dissolve the tie. We shall live in a circle of what are 
called in the cant of our day elective affinities ; the 
grand old name of Relations will be treated as obso- 
lete. That you may escape this danger, I dwell upon 
this fact that we are in an Order; that relations abide 
whether we are faithful to them or neglect them ; and 
that the Conscience in each of us affirms "I am in 
this order, I ought to act consistently with it, let my 
fancies say what they please." . . . The reverence 
for parents, the sanctity of the marriage vow, the per- 
manence of friendships, are all in peril from the con- 
fusion between likings and affections. Those who 
resolutely draw a distinction between them will have 
tlieir reward. They will find that the Conscience pro- 
tests not against the fervency, but against the coldness, 
feebleness, uncertainty of our affections. 

Nothing that I know is more touching than Marcus 
Aurelius Antoninus' enumeration of the debts which 
he owed to his mother, to his predecessor who had 
adopted him, to his instructors in every department, 
to the friends who had preserved him from any flat- 
tery, who had given him hints for the fulfilment of 
any duty. For Duty meant to him exactly the reverse 
of that which it means in the philosophy of Mr. Bain. 
It was literally that which, under no dread of punish- 
ment, but with great thankfulness, he confessed to be 



DUTY. 179 

due from him. He was aware of the temptation to 
neglect it; that was the slavish impulse; freedom to 
perform it was what he sought with all earnestness. 
. . Philosophy was never an excuse to him for avoid- 
ing troublesome business. . . . He had a con- 
science of tlie bondage into which we bring ourselves 
by the neglect of little things : he would have accepted 
those grand words of our poet in his ode to Duty, 
whicli recognizes all freedom and all joy as springing 
from submission to its commands. 

Every one has some work to do. Every one has in- 
ducements to forsake that work for things which, 
whether pleasant to others or not, are pleasant to him. 
. . . Mr. Bentham's assumption that what is pleas- 
ant is natural, that Nature has appointed it for us, 
commends itself to his judgment. Only there is some- 
thing in him which says, " I ought not. The agreea- 
ble thinsf will hinder me from doing: the thin 2; which I 
am occupied with. The agreeable thing accepted to- 
day will make me weaker to-morrow, less capable of 
determining my course, more the victim of the im- 
pulses and impressions that come to me from without." 

No doubt each step as we advance does make us 
more aware of that which we have to lift ; (we learn) 
thaV the heaviest weight which a man has to bear is 



180 FAITH AND ACTION. 

himself. That is surely a hard lesson if there comes 
with it no promise of a way in which he may throw 
off himself. He has had hints upon that subject in 
his previous experience. Each family relation has said 
to him something about the possibility of losing him- 
self in another ; has taught him that he only realizes a 
blessing when he confers it. This remembrance is not 
enough for his ])resent growth ; his personal distinct- 
ness has been discovered to him ; he cannot merely 
fall back upon domestic sympathies. But they may 
remain to illuminate the new road which he has en- 
tered ; there may still be a way by which he can lose 
hiiuself and so find himself. 

The habit of measuring ourselves by others is one 
into which we slide most easily, and which involves 
continual unfairness to tliem, still greater to ourselves. 
I ask why I may not indulge in extravagances in which 
a man of twice or thrice my means indulges freely; 
why I may not eat and drink what a man with twice 
or thrice my strength or my labor jierhaps needs. I 
cling therefore to the " J ought " and the " I ought 
not;" that will not interfere with the discovery and 
acknowledgment of laws by which we are all bound ; 
it will prevent me from assuming the practice of this 
man or that as the standard of mine, or my practice 
as the standard of his. 



DUTY. 181 






Vainly, therefore, are we told that if there is a Con- 
science in each man that Conscience must be its own 
standard, that the only escape is to suppose a Con- 
science created by a Social Opinion. All such propo- 
sitions look very plausible upon paper ; bring them to 
the test of living experience and they melt away. 
There is that in me which asks for the Right, for that 
which ought to have dominion over me ; there is that 
in me which says emphatically, "This is not that 
Right, this ought not to have dominion over me." I 
may be long in learning what the Right is ; I may 
make a thousand confused efforts to grasp it ; I may 
try to make it for myself ; I may let others make it 
for me. But always there will be a witness in me that 
what I have made, or any one has made, is not what 
I ought to serve ; that is not the right, not what I am 
seeking for, not what is seeking me. 

Mr. Thackeray used to talk of week-day preachers 
and to demand a place among them for himself. As a 
Sunday preacher, I am inwardly and painfully con- 
vinced that no persons more require the kind of mo- 
nition which he supplied than those whose regular 
business obligees them to tell other men of their wronsr- 
doings and temptations. Their function cannot, there- 
fore, I apprehend, supersede that of the Casuist. 



182 FAITH AND ACTION. 

Clergymen may learn from him, when they are pre- 
jDaring for their after work, some of the perils to 
which it will expose them. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is to me the great practi- 
cal existing reality which is to renew the earth and 
make it a habitation for blessed spirits instead of for 
demons. To preach the Gospel of that Kingdom, the 
fact that it is among us, and is not to be set up at all, 
is my calling and business. ... If ever I do any 
good work and earn any of the hatred which the godly 
in Christ Jesus receive, and haVe a right to, it must 
be in the way I have indicated, by proclaiming society 
and humanity to be divine realities as they standi not 
as they may become, and by calling upon the priests, 
kings, prophets of the world to answer for their sin, 
in having made them unreal by separating them from 
that living and eternal God who has established them 
in Christ for His glory. 



yii. 

ASPIRATION. 

Every prayer is a renunciation of independence. 
Every prayer says "We can do nothing without Thee." 
As Christ's prayers were the essentially true prayers, 
they must have had this meaning perfectly, without 
any reservation. 

Christ is in you ; submit yourself to Him. Say, 
"Lord, I submit." Xot now, but at every moment of 
your life : tell Him of whatever sins and sorrows are 
disturbing you : of sins no less than sorroics / of sor- 
roics, no less than sins. . . . Ask that He will do 
His will in you, which is your blessedness. 

We want a home for our hearts just as much as we 
want a home for our limbs. Every one of us is look- 
ing for such a home. We need something, as we say, 
to set our hearts upon, and we try a number of things. 
. . . We try various pleasures, some good, some 
bad, but none last long enough, none will give a man 
space to rest in, and those which suit one do not suit 

183 



184 FAITH AND ACTION. 

another. And some desire to have some possession 
which they cannot enjoy together, so they have to 
struggle each one to drive out the other. Could there 
not be a home for all? Could there not be something 
in which we might abide for ever? There is such a 
home for all. Tlie home is a person, is a friend. We 
are baptized into Jesus Christ : we put on His name ; 
we claim Him as the Lord and Friend and Brother of 
us all. ..." And now," says St. John, " act as if 
this were so : act as if you had this Friend ; let your 
hearts stay in this home : do not go out of it." 

* * 
The more sincerely and faithfully we deal with our 

own minds, the more I believe we sliall discover that 

the highest knowledge of all does not come at once ; 

and 7\ever comes in phrases and abstractions. If man 

is capable of knowing God, it must be because there 

is that in him, that in every part of his being, which 

responds to something in God. 

* 
* * 

Let each for himself long and pray that the evil 
spirits which have had dominion over him may be cast 
out now. Let us ask that we may become exorcists 
ourselves. For is not every true and living man and 
woman an exorcist? Is not every one who will yield 
himself to be Christ's servant, ])ermitted to deliver his 
brother from some spirit which has enslaved him? 



ASPIRATION. 185 

* 

The formula that " our jw^ishes are fore-feelings of 
our capabilities " is, I believe, one of much beauty and 
worth : ... In looking back to the castles of ear- 
liest boyhood, we may see that they were not wholly 
built of air — that part of the materials of which they 
were composed were derived from a deep quarry in 
ourselves — that in the form of their architecture were 
shadowed out the tendencies, the professions, the 
schemes, of after years. Many may smile sadly when 
they think how little the achievements of the man 
have corresponded to the expectations of the child or 
of the youth. But they cannot help feeling that those 
expectations had a certain appropriateness to their 
characters and their powers; that they might have 
been fulfilled, not according to the original design, but 
in some better way. I do not think that such retro- 
spects can be without interest, or need be without 
profit, to any one. 

* 

In desjjonding moods one may dream that a worship 
based upon our own conceptions and likings — a wor- 
ship which, because we invent it for ourselves, will 
represent our lowest thoughts and confirm and deepen 
those in us — may conquer all that has struggled with 
it, all that has borne witness to us of a Life which is 
higher than our own. But, when we are in our i-ight 



186 FAITH AND ACTION. 

minds we know that this cannot be. The more stead- 
fastly and earnestly we labor . . . for the progress 
of Plumanity . . . the more will the AYorship to 
which domestic Relations have led the way — the 
Worship which seeks for a ground of Humanity be- 
neath itself — expel the superstitions into which vulgar 
men and philosophers equally are betrayed when they 
make cfods of their own and bow down before them. 



* 
* * 



I am a very bad proselytiser. If I could persuade 
all dissenters to become members of my church to- 
morrow, I should be very sorry to do it : I believe the 
chances are that they might leave it the next day. I 
do not wish to make them think as I think. But I 
want that they and I should be what we pretend to 
be, and then I doubt not we should find that there is 
a common ground for all far beneath our thinkings. 
For truth I hold not to be that which every man trow- 
eth, but to be that which lies at the bottom of all 
men's trowings, that in which those trowings have 
their only meeting-point. 






. . . "We can come boldly to Ilim every day to 
ask Him to make us true when we feel false, and brave 
when we feel cowardly, and strong to act when we 
feel as if we could do nothing. So this is a lesson for 
us who are going about the world, as much as for 



ASPIRATION, 187 

those wlio are on sick beds. We want healing — con- 
tinual healing — just as they do. We want strength 
as much as they do : strength to be right and to do 
right : strength for the work that we have to do each 
day. 

* 

May Christ give us honesty and courage to confess 
our blindness, that we may turn to Him who can make 
us see ! May He deliver us from all conceit of our 
own illumination, lest we should become hopelessly 
dark! 

A man who feels that he is called to a work, does 
not, therefore, feel power to accomplish it. He may 
feel ... an increased feebleness: but he under- 
stands that he may ask the Father, whose will he is 
called to do, that that will may be done : so he wins a 
strength which is and is not his own. 

Christ's prayer was the acknowledgment of that 
which had been revealed to Him, His filial acceptance 
of what had been -prepared for Him. And surely, all 
prayer must be this. It is the acknowledging of that, 
be it sad or joyful, which has been given to us ; it is 
the casting of our experience upon Him who has 
brought us into it and who understands it, because 



ISS FAITH AND ACTION. 

without Him we cannot go through it, or in the least 
understand it ourselves. 

Cln-ist can only say " Father^ save me from this 
hour,'''' and yet He adds, " For this cause came I unto 
this hour.'''' It is not often that these actual signs of 
the struggle within Him are declared to us. How 
wise and necessary that we should have only rare and 
occasional discoveries of it! But of what unspeaka- 
ble worth have these discoveries been to the hearts of 
sufferers in every age ! The agony must be passed 
through ; the death-struggle, which is most tremen- 
dous after the vision of coming good has been the 
brightest. But the sting of solitude, which is the 
sharjjest of all, is taken out of it. Christ has cried 
" Save me from this hour !'''' 

* * 
Do not attempt to analyze your feelings. Do not 
try to find out how much of them is excusable, how 
much not. God gives repentance, we do not make it. 
We may tell Him as well as we can what a mess and 
labyrinth we are in. We may at least say, "Guide us 
through it and out of it." 



3 



* 



Hope for ourselves; hope for all ; but hope of life, 
not of Death, of a real Heaven, not of a Heaven 



ASPIRATION. 189 

which is a pleasant Hell ; this is what we want ; this 
the spirit of God would keep alive within us. 

A Church ought ... to teach us in our public 
worship what a number of persons we have to do with 
in the common intercourse of life, and how solemn our 
relation to them all is, how certainly it has its ground 
in our common relation to God and is only understood 
and acted on when we refer it to Him. The suf£ra2:es 
which follow the Creed and Lord's Prayer have, as I 
conceive, the object, and might have the blessed effect 
of suggesting to Ministers and People what wishes 
they should be cherishing for each other and for all 
men; what should be the habits of their minds, 
whether they are speaking or silent ; what kind of 
aspirations the Heavenly Father, who knows their 
necessities before they ask, would be drawing forth 
from them. 

If, in spite of all reluctance, we determine not to go 
out in search of Christ into the deserts, not to shut 
ourselves in the secret chambers that we may have 
Him to ourselves there ; if we will expect Him among 
the knaves and blackguards, and hypocrites of the 
world, and will act as if we believed they had the 
same right in Him that we have, . . . we shall be 
acquiring by degrees the power of recognition, the 



100 FAITH AND ACTION. 

human sympathies which He is seeking to* cultivate in 
us ; we shall be winning a victory over the vanity and 
conceit which shut us up in our own little circles and 
lesser selves ; we shall be preparing for the gathering 
tofrether of all in Christ. 



* 
* * 



The longing for j^ersonal sympathy has something 
right in it, but I suppose it is akin to disease, and 
whenever I am able to reflect wisely and earnestly, I 
desire that those who have ever got any good out of 
me, should grow much too old and wise for my teach- 
ing, and should not feel themselves cramped and 
chained by it. I had some terrible experiences many 
years ago from not learning that lesson, and wishing 
(secretly) that a dear friend who once regarded me as 
a sort of guide, should go on doing so, when he was 
fitter to guide me. Ever since his death, I have 
mourned over that vanity, and desired that I should 



never fall into it again. 






Every one of us may ask that Divine Word, who is 
near to us, and with us, for an understanding heart. 
Every one of us who feels that a great work is laid 
upon him . . . and that he is but a little child, 
may crave for a spirit to discern the good and the evil 
in himself and in all others. And if we feel . . . 
that what we need above all things else is that sense 



ASPIRATION'. 191 

of responsibility, that consciousness of a calling, that 
feeling of feebleness, which were the source of Solo- 
mon's {trayer, let us ask for these gifts first. 

It is possible to show that we love the truth more 
than our opinions and ourselves, if we do love it more. 
And there will be the rich reward of teaching others 
to love it more than themselves and their opinions, and 
so of making them in very deed our fellow-citizens 
and fellow-workers. 

Oh, do not let the sluggish, turbid current of your 
ordinary days seem to you that which truly represents 
to you what you are, what you are able to be ! Xo, 
the time when you made the holiest resolutions, when 
you struggled most with the j^owers of evil, when you 
said it should not be your master, when Love con- 
quered you and freed you from other chains that you 
might wear her chains, t/iaty that was the true index 
to the Divine purpose concerning you : that tells you 
what the Spirit of God is every hour working in you 
that you may be. You may not be able to revive the 
feeling which you had then, but He who gave you that 
feeling. He is with you, is striving with you, that you 
may will and do of His good pleasure. Only do not 
strive with Him that He may leave you to yourself 
and to the power* of evil. 



192 FAITH AND ACTION. 

There must be a day when all things in heaven and 
earth which consist only by Christ shall be gathered 
manifestly together in Him, when it shall be known 
and confessed that there is one king, one priest, one 
sacrifice ; that we have been at war with each other, 
because we have not done homasje to that one kins;. . 
. . And those who are willing before God's altar to 
own that their sclf-scekino: and self-will have been 
rending asunder their families, the nation, the Church, 
the world, may hope that God's spirit will work in 
them henceforth to do all such acts as shall not retard, 
but hasten forward, the blessed consummation for 
which they look. They may ask to be taught the 
mystery of daily self-sacrifice — how to give up their 
own tastes, opinions, wishes. They may nsk that they 
may never be tempted to give up one atom of God's 
truth, or to dally for one moment with the falsehoods 
of themselves or of their brethren : because truth is 
the one giound of universal peace and brotherhood, 
because falsehood and division are ever increasing and 

reproducing each other. 

* 

. . . The eagerness of our entreaty (that God's 
will may be done, God's kingdom may come) will 
depend, first, upon our belief that His is a good 
will and a good kingdom ; secondly, upon our experi- 



ASPIRATION, 193 

ence that there is a very bad will and a very bad king- 
dom actually and perpetually resisting it; thirdly, 
upon our confidence that we are meant to be fellow- 
workers with our Father in heaven — meant, with the 
energies of our wills, and the energies of our acts, to 
assist in the victory of the true over the false. 

* 

" O Thou who knowest what I am, and where I 
am, bring me out of these mists, these false, confused 
lights, into the open day." A reasonable prayer if 
God is merciful, and man is weak — if God is our 
Father, and we are His cliildren ; the only prayer 
oftentimes which it is possible for man to offer. 
. lie brings nothing; he casts himself in mere de- 
pendence and despair before One who must raise him, 
if he is not to sink further and further; who must 
make him true, if he is not to become falser and falser. 

All heathen prayer supposes that a man knows liis 
own wants, and that He whom he worships may attend 
to him when he makes them known with sufficient 
clearness and earnestness. Its strength, therefore, lies 
in much speaking. A number of arrows must be shot 
at different distant marks that there may be a chance 
of some hitting. All Cliristian prayer supposes that 
our Father knows what we have need of before we 



194 FAITH AND ACTION. 

ask Him ; that He makes us conscious of our needs, 
and leads us to declare them to Him. . . . But 
the words " Heathen " and " Christian " may be easily 
abused to purposes of self-exaltation and self-delusion. 
Our Lord never taught His disciples that they would 
be exempt from any of the temptations or evil inclina- 
tions of other men. Neither the Old Covenant nor 
the New, Circumcision or Baptism, Law or Gospel, 
Nation or Church, has the power to make us in our- 
selves a race of pure holy beings. 

We know — we positively know — what the Cain 
offering is, because we have presented the like our- 
selves. "We have prayed ; and then have complained, 
just as the Jews did, that it has been all in vain, that 
no good has come of it. We have made sacrifices and 
we have wondered that we got no reward for them. 
Perhaps we have been angry that, being so good, we 
have not been more favored by fortune and circum- 
stances. Perhaps we have been angry that, trying so 
liard to make ourselves good, we have succeeded so 
little. Perhaps we have had a general notion that 
God could not be persuaded to be gracious to us and 
forgive us, in spite of all the sacrifices we have offered, 
and that we must try others which are more costly. . 
. . Assuredly, this is the Cain spirit in us all. . . . 
Was not our sin that we supposed God to be an arbi- 



ASPIRATION. 195 

traiy Being whom we, by our sacrifices and prayers, 
were to conciliate? "VYas not this the false notion 
which lay at the root of all our discontent, of all the 
evil thoughts and acts w^hich sprung out of it ? We 
did not begin with trust, but with distrust; we did not 
worship God because we believed in Him, but because 
we dreaded Him. 

If you study the construction (of the Collects) you 
will find that the principle "Our Father knoweth what 
things we have need of before we ask " is assumed in 
all of them. Some strong satisfying view of the 
character of God, of His love to men, of what He 
has done for men, is the ground of the prayer; then 
follows the simple expression of some want of which 
the heart is conscious — some want which we feel, and 
yet which seems often to lie too deep for utterance ; 
perhaps it is this very want of the power to tell, or 
even to know what one is wanting ; the result is a pe- 
tition that God, who desires us to have the good which 
we cannot grasp, will make His will effectual in spite 
of our inability, in spite even of our reluctance. 

"We are to bring," says the Casuist, "humble and 
contrite hearts. And, therefore, it must be ascertained 
what contrition is, and how much of contrition is 
needful to constitute a true repentance, an acceptable 



196 FAITH AND ACTION. 

sacrifice." In what delicate scales have men's tears 
and sorrows been weighed out by divines, to know 
wliether they answered to this standard ; how the 
hearts and consciences of suffering and penitent men 
have been, not tormented merely — that is nothing — 
but made utterly insincere and false by their efforts to 
apply the rules and test their own condition! And 
vain it is to point out, in mere words, that as long as a 
man fancies that he has contrition, or any other pres- 
ent, to bring to God, in order to make himself accept- 
able, so loner he is not reallv huniblino: himself: he is 
not confessing that he is a sinner ; he is not giving up 
himself. . . . But God makes this known to a man 
in/<:/c^/ His discipline brings us to understand it in- 
wardly. 

How much has the indifference and listlessness 
Avliich we witness to do with want of ho])e ! How 
strenuous, we are sure, some of tlie laziest people 
about us might become, if they had but any goal in 
the distance which might, some day, be reached. If 
for a moment they do catch sight of such a goal, if 
tliev only fancy that they do what a movement there 
is in the midst of their torpor; how the dry bones 
shake, are ready almost to come together, to start up, 
to live ! But it seems as if these impulses were to 
become rarer and rarer. . . . There is a decay 



ASPIRATION. 197 

of hope and of all the moral strength which hope 
awakens. Men are not content with what they see 
about them, far less content with themselves, yet they 
do not look for anything higher or better. They do 
not think it is worth while to struggle to retain that 
which they have, any more than to grasp that which 
they have not. . . . There is a sleepy dreary 
fatalism into which we are settling down. . . . 
We need something more than an earthly or a human 
voice to break that slumber, and prevent it from pass- 
ing into death. I believe that voice is speaking to us. 
. . . I need not repeat what I have said to you so 
often that the opening of Heaven in tliis book (of 
Revelations) and elsewhere in Scripture, does not im- 
ply the discovery of a distant or future paradise, but 
of the kingdom of God which is in the midst of us ; 
the divine order which is hidden from the eye, but 
apart from which nothing that the eye beholds has any 
meaning or substance. What was opened to the Seer 
at this time was then, as I believe, the mystery of our 
human condition, of the world within us and without 
us, of the power which is working for every man and 
against every man ! . . . of the purpose which 
may govern every man's life, of the sure and certain 
hope which is set before mankind, a hope of which 
every man is an inheritor, if he does not disclaim his 
manhood. 



198 FAITH AND ACTION. 






Let us riot be cast down or lose our heart and hope 
for anything that we may feel within, any more than 
for anything that we may see around us. . . . The 
secret of strength, friend and brotlier, of all moral pur- 
pose is to assure thyself that thou art not engaged in 
a battle between two portions of thy own nature. It 
is Christ in thee, who is inviting thee, commanding 
tliee to every brave, and true, and earnest effort. And 
in His commandment is life ; what He bids thee to do, 
he will enable thee to do. . . . And Mith moral 
purpose will come hope. When we think of Christ as 
a Being at a distance from us — who has merely done 
a mighty work ; when we eat the bread and drink the 
wine in remembrance of an absent Friend, not as 
pledges of a near and present one ; the pressure of evil 
that crushes down our faith and hope and love seems 
to make the past redemption wholly unavailing for our 
great necessity. But Christ in us, as St. Paul told the 
Colossians, is the hope of glory. What we want is not 
that we should attain some separate and selfish bliss, 
but that He, who has been striving with us all our lives 
through, to deliver us from the separation and selfish- 
ness which have been our torment and curse, should fin- 
ally effect His own purpose . . that we should be His 
willing servants; free children of His Father, formed 
into one family and body by His blessed Spirit for ever. 



ASPIRATION. 199 

The Reformers . . . could treat men — not a few 
here and there with si^ecial tastes and tempers of mind 
— not easy men with plenty of leisure for self-contem- 
plation — but the poorest, no less than the richest, the 
busiest, no less than the idlest, as spiritual beings, with 
spiritual necessities, with spiritual aj^petites, which 
God's spirit is ever seeking to awaken, and the gratifi- 
cation of which, instead of unfitting them for the com- 
mon toil of life, is precisely the preparation for it, 
precisely the means of enabling tliem to be clear, 
straightforward, manly ; to fulfil their different callings 
in the belief that each one of them, be it grand or petty, 
sacred or secular in the vocabulary of men, is a holy 
callino; in the siojht of God. But to assert that man is 
a spiritual being in this sense, you must claim for him a 
right and power to pray. You must give him a com- 
mon prayer in every sense, of the word, not special 
prayers adapted to special temperaments and moods of 
character, but human ; . . . reaching to the throne 
of God, meeting the daily lowly duties of man. 

The Paternoster is not, as some fancy, the easiest, 
most natural, of all devout utterances. It may be com- 
mitted to memory quickly, but it is slowly learnt by 
heart. Men may repeat it over ten times in an hour, 



200 FAITH AND ACTION. 

but to use it when it is most needed, to know what it 
means, to believe it, yea, not to contradict it in the 
very act of praying it . . . this is hard ; this is 
one of the highest gifts wliich God can bestow upon us ; 
nor can we look to receive it without others which we 
may wish for less ; sharp suffering, a sense of wanting 
a home, a despair of ourselves. 

I think that a priest who . . . invites us to join 
in a prayer of this kind and then acts as our spokesman 
and interpreter, bears a better witness for the si)iritual 
condition of man, for his deliverance from the fetters 
of time and place . . . than that which is borne 
by those who maintain tliat worship is only free and 
comprehensive in woods or upon mountains. Worship 
there as much as you j)lease ; the more, the better. 
But take care that you do not fly thither to be out of 
the way of those who live in close alleys, damp cellars, 
dark garrets. Take care that you are not running from 
your kind to be easy and comfortable in your own 
grand tlioughts. If you do so, you may worship a 
spirit of the air, but you will not worship God who is a 
Spirit. You may exalt yourself, but you will not feel 
that you are a spirit ; for a spirit seeks true fellowship 
with all other spirits. Churches are not built as signs 
of exclusion, but of reconciliation. 



ASPIRATION. 201 



* 



At all hazards, in despite of all reasonings, and all 
authority, cling to the prayer, {Thy Will be done). 
That will never do you harm, or lead you astray. The 
more we use it, in tlie faith that the Will we ask should 
be done is the right, loving and blessed Will, the more 
we shall know that it is, the more we shall be sure that 
it must be done. We shall meet every day with a set 
of new impediments to that conviction ; at times it will 
seem the most monstrous and incredible of all convic- 
tions ; tlien when it does, the prayer is specially needed 
to raise us above the plausible lies of our understand- 
ings ; to place us in a j^Aint of view whence we can see 
the truth which surmounts them. That point of view 
is obtained when our state is the lowliest. 






Thought and prayer both come from a hidden source ; 
they go forth to fight with foes and gain victory in the 
external world ; they return to rest in Him who in- 
spii-ed them. Oh ! how fresh and original*will each of 
our lives become, what flatness will pass from society, 
wliat barrenness from conversation, what excitement 
and restlessness from our religious acts, when we under- 
stand these secrets ! — when the morning prayer is 
really a prayer for grace to One whose service is per- 
fect freedom, in knowledge of whom is eternal life ; 
when at evening we really ask One from whom all 



202 FAITH AND ACTION. 

good thoughts and holy desires and just works proceed 
for the peace which the world cannot give. 

To despair of the present must be bad : to hope for 
the future must be good. And this hope our Lord 
cherishes and confirms, as muich as he disowns that 
despair. . . . "7/6 is 71 ot the God of the dead, but 
of the living ; for all live icnto Ilim.'''' What are all 
speculations about separate states and intermediate ex- 
existences to this celestial sentence ? 

Each sorrow is entertained in a different chamber of 
imagery ; strikes a different string of the heart. No 
wonder, therefore, people ask for special prayers, for 
prayers suited to their own cases. Their mistake is 
this — they suppose it is possible for them to make, or 
for their priests to make, prayers which shall suit their 
cases ; and which shall not suit a multitude of cases be- 
sides. The individuality is not given by the words 
spoken, but by him who speaks them. . . . If they 
only touch the specialities of your suffering, they will 
not tell what you are suffering ; if they go down far 
enough into your experience to be adequate for that 
purpose, they will inevitably meet and represent the 
thoughts of people whose circumstances, education, 
temi»erament, are altogether unlike yours. Tlie first 
simple idea of prayer, which is so apt to be lost in spec- 



ASPIRATION. 203 

Illations about its qualities and conditions, that it is a 
call upon God, who knoweth all things, is the true es- 
cape from these and almost all other j^erplexities. 

It is an idle fashion of preachers to bid people who 
have sold themselves to the world, not to love it. They 
do not love it ; their love is all dried up and exhausted. 
They tell you so. They say, " It is a dreary business 
altogether ; we wish we were fairly out of it ; only we 
do not know what is to come after ; that may be 
worse." Talk not to such men of giving up love. Try 
whether there is not some object which, even in the 
midst of their weariness — yes, even because they are 
so weary, — they may be tempted to embrace. Tell 
them of a Father's love, which is seeking them out ; 
which has allowed them to wander away from home, 
and to feel famine and feed upon husks, that they may 
be driven to seek Him — that so the yoke of the world 
may be broken from their necks ; it never can be broken 
by exhortations about the vanity of enjoyments which 
they know much better than the preacher does, to be 
insipid and insincere. It is the man who is full o^ the 
highest, bravest, most godly impulses, who rejoices in 
the belief that he has a Father in Heaven, and that He 
is good, and that the world is overflowing with His 
goodness — it is just he who needs this warning, 
" Love not the tcorld^'' — needs it, not that the fire in 



204 FAITH AND ACTION, 

his heart may burn less vehemently; not that he may 
be chilled with prudential notions ; but precisely that 
the fire may not die out and leave only a few smoulder- 
ing ashes behind ; precisely that he may not sink into 
a dry, withered, heartless creature, a despiser of all 
youthful aspirations and hopes. 

* 

Let us be very careful in understanding the tcmpta^ 
tion of the age, because it is certainly our own. Let 
ns not think we escape it by doing just the opposite of 
those who seem to us to have fallen into it ; by culti- 
vating all opinions and notions which they reject ; by 
fearing a truth when they speak it. We may find that 
their practical conclusions meet us at the point which 
"WO thought the furthest from them, and that we have 
turned away from the very ])rinciple with which we 
might have strengthened ourselves, if not have done 
Forne good to them. Still less let us refuse to have 
our rtwn loose and incoherent notions brought to trial, 
lest in losing them we should lose the eternal truths of 
God's word. Depend upon it they are in the greatest 
peril from every insincere habit of mind we tolerate 
in ourselves: thev will come out with a briirhtness we 
have never dreamed of when we are made sim})le and 
honest. Therefore let us pray this prayer, '■'• IIallov:ed 
he T/n/ Xcnne^^'' believing that it has been answered, 
and l-eini]: confident that it will be answered. 



ASPIRATION, 205 

. . . If I have not failed wholly to express the 
mind of St. John, I have shown you that it is Life we 
v/ant ; that everything is worthless except that. . . 
. It is the life of a Son, it is filial love, which he de- 
sires we should all possess ; it is a life which does not 
exclude one human creature from its blessedness. 
That we rise into theology when we seek for this life, 
I have confessed from the first ; for theology means 
the teaching or word concerning God ; and St. John's 
teaching or word concerning God is, that this loving 
universal life is His; and that He has made us par- 
takers of it. But if we rise into theology, it is not 
tliat we may bring ourselves into a circle of notions, 
opinions, dogmas; it is that we may escape from them; 
it is that we may drop the forms and conceits of our 
mind, as the butterfly droj^s the chrysalis in which it 

has been buried. 

* 

Truth will always seem deeper, broader, higher, the 
nearer we approach it: the more we converse with 
the eternal, the less shall we dream of comprehending it. 
But does not our unrest come from the desire to hold 
that in the hollow of our hands which holds us ; in 
which we are living? Christ came to deliver us from 
this unrest. He plunged into the deep waters. They 
sustained Him : He tells us thev will sustain us. The 



206 FAITH AND ACTION. 

unfathomable truth of which He bore witness is our 
home and dwelling-pkxce. To be in fellowship with 
that, is to be perfect, as our Father in heaven is per- 
fect. To be struggling with whatever opposes that, in 
ourselves and in our brethren, is to be entering into 
Christ's work on earth. This truth ... is the 
same that men in every age have sought and struggled 
for. ... AVhat they wanted, what their inmost 
hearts told them must be, was a righteousness and love 
without variableness, or the sliadow of a turning. 
They called it, and call it still, Happiness. What they 
want is that which is, beyond all chance or hap, a 
Beins: in whom their beino: can find its end and aim. 
Tliey have climbed up to hca\en and gone down to 
the deep in search of it. Lo ! it is near to them ; 
their hearts may turn to it and repose in it. They 
hoped to find it in some condition of their own minds. 
They do find it, when, worn out with their own efforts, 
they say, "Thou wlio art the truth, Thou in whom is 

the eternal life, hold us u]), for we are Thine." 

* 

. . . Every gross and cruel superstition has this 
origin and definition ; it springs from ignorance of the 
name of God : it consists in and bv that i<xnorance. 
It mixes Him with His creatures ; first, with what is 
highest in them, next with what is mean, then with 
what is basest ; finally it identifies Him with the Evil 



ASPIRATION. 207 

Spirit. What is darkest and most hateful ; what a 
man flies from most and would desire should not exist ; 
this becomes the object of his worship. 

During the weeks of Lent, in ^vhich we have been 
hearing of the calamities of other men, or entering 
into trials of our own, there will have been thoughts 
put into our minds ... of some good we might 
do, some wrong we might redress, some disease that 
has penetrated into the vitals of our society — the 
seeds of which we can detect too clearly in ourselves 
— that we should be assisting to cure. We are too 
well used, alas ! each of us, to see such thoughts in 
the blossom, and then to see them falling before they 
ripen further, or nipped by the frost just as they have 
budded. ExjDerience has made us callous to such 
sights. But they are unspeakably sad. To help to 
pave Hell with these half-formed, broken resolutions — 
should we not strive earnestly that we may not do that ? 

The forty days, which bring the Fasting and Tempt- 
ation to our mind, are given us especially that we 
may be taught how to pray this prayer (" Give us this 
day our daily breacV^). . . . There are some who 
know, in their consciences, that they are apt to mock 
God when they speak these solemn words, apt to take 
food and every other blessing as if it were their right 



208 FAITH AND ACTION. 

of which no power in heaven^r earth except by sheer 
injustice can deprive them. Something which shall 
tell them of dependence, some secret reminiscence, 
insignificant to others, that all things are not tlieir 
own ; some hint that there are a few million creatures 
of their flesh and blood who cannot call any of these 
tilings their own, is needful for tJieni. If it comes in 
the form of j)unishment sent specially to themselves, 
they cannot say it was not wanted ; if it is a voice 
addressed generally to the whole Church, a season 
returning year by year, they cannot pretend that there 
are any satisfactory reasons why they should close 
their ears to it. What they ought to desire is, that 
they may keep the end in sight ; so they will not 
reckon means, of whatever kind they be, of any value 
for their own sakes ; they will not fancy that to ab- 
stain from food is more meritorious in God's sight, 
than to eat it ; if in either case equally, they are de- 
siring to recollect that it is a good which He bestows. 
Above all, they will feel that, wliatever else Lent is, it 
is certainly a time of confession, and their great liope 
of being ever able to use this prayer more faithfully 
must be grounded on an examination of the causes 
which have made it so unreal in times past. 

. . . The sublimest teaching may be the most 
homely . . . the grandest expectations of the 



ASPIRATION. ^ 209 

future mav most cheer us for the toils and sufferino;s 
of the present. Our expectations of the future divide 
us from the present when they are selfish. We are 
less fit to endure common griefs, to alleviate the griefs 
of others, when we are desiring blessings which our 
fellow-men will not share. Nothing can brace us so 
much to painful effort, to continual patience, as the 
hope of a revelation of the Universal Deliverer, of an 
Emancipator of the whole Creation. 

Self-willing, self-seeking, self-glorifying, here is the 
curse : no shackles remain when these are gone ; noth- 
ing can be wanting when the spirit sees itself, loses 
itself, in Him who is Light and in whom is no dark- 
ness at all. In these words, therefore, (" Thine is the 
^^ory") we see the ground and consummation of our 
prayer; they show how prayer begins and ends in Sac- 
rifice and Adoration. They teach us how prayer, 
which we might fancy was derived from the wants of 
an imperfect suffering creature, belongs equally to the 
redeemed and perfected. In these the craving for 
independence has ceased ; they are content to ask and 
to receive. But their desire of knowledo-e and love 



never ceases. 






The Hindoo, in action the idlest, is in imagining, 
dreaming, combinino;, the most busv of all huj'sian 



210 FAITH AND ACTION. 

creatures. . . . Have we not found an assurance 
in the mind of these people that all the efforts of 
thouo-ht in them must orioinate in a communication 
from above, and require fresh communications to meet 
them? In the thinking, or reasoning, or religious 
faculty, call it what you will, . . . have arisen 
desires and loni^^insrs after converse with the unseen 
world, with some living being in the unseen world, 
with some one between whom and himself he feels 
there is a relation. His religious books echo the cry : 
they mutter a lialf-rcsponse to it ; but the response is 
only tlie question thrown into a more definite form. 
Tlie highest stu<lent meditates on the problem, and 
rejieats his own thoughts; or more probably, what 
some ancient person, who meditated and conversed 
with the Divinity, said about it. The circle is a very 
weary one ; if we calmly consider it, and what kind 
of comfort those receive who are always revolving in 
it, we si 1 all confess that the Hindoo is right in his be- 
lief that tlie wisdom of which he sees the image and 
reflection, must speak and declare itself to him ; that 
he cannot always be left to grope his way amidst 
the shadows which it casts in his own mind, or in the 
world around him. I ask nothing more than the Hin- 
doo system and the Hindoo life as evidence that there 
is that ill man which demands a Revelation — that 
there is 7iot that in him which makes the Revelation. 



ASPIRATION. 211 

— God's will must be the law of the universe. Every 
creature in the universe must be in a rioiit or wrons: 
position, must be doing his work well, or failing iu 
it, as he yields himself to this will, or as he resists it. 
And let us not fancy that the early Mahometan was 
entirely mistaken as to the way in which this will 
ought to be obeyed. He may not have understood 
what enemies he had to fight with, what weapons he 
had to wield, but he did discover that the life of man 
is to be a continual battle, that we are only men when 
we are enojaored in a battle. He was rioht that there 
is something in the world which we are not to tolerate, 
which we are sent into it to exterminate. First of all, 
let us seek that we may be freed from it ourselves ; 
but let us be taught by the Mussulman tliat we shall 
not compass this end unless we believe, and act upon 
the belief, that every man and every nation exists for 
the purpose of chasing falsehood and evil out of God's 
universe. 

Look at these religions, and you see in tliera all a 
witness of unity. Look at them again and you see 
there is somethincr which divides them from each other. 
They confess that if men are to unite, it must be in 
something above themselves ; they cannot unite; for 
things beneath themselves, the accidents of life, the 



212 FAITU AXD ACTION. 

climate, the soil of the lands in which they dwell, 
seem to determine what it is that is above them. . . 
. This is the report which history gives of these re- 
ligions, the stamp which they have left of themselves 
upon tlie actual universe. Dare you talk of all this as 
merely an illustration of the working of the religious 
principle in men ? ... Or can you comfort your- 
self with saying, "These have all passed away; the 
Persian Ormuzd and Ahriman, — the Egyptian dream 
of types in the world which must have some anti- 
type, — the Greek question, . . . the Odin warfare 
of good and evil spirits ; they have passed away as 
visions of the niglit." Visions they were, but visions 
which came to men concerning the dreadful realities of 
their own existence. They were visions of the night, 
but by them men had to steer their vessels and shnj)e 
tlicir course; without tlicm, nil would liave been dark. 
And we belong to tlie same race with the men who 
lind these visions: some nearer to us, some more dis- 
tnnt, some . . . almost our kinsmen after the 
flesh ; (/// our kinsmen in reality. 

* * 
We arc in a world of action, and energy, and enter- 
prise, more uidike that dreaming and speculative world 
we have been hearinj; of than the soil and climate of 
England are unlike those of Ilindostan. And yet, I 
will be bold to sav it, the same thoughts which stir the 



ASPIRATION. 213 

spirit of the Indian sage and the Indian Sndra, are 
working secretly beneath all our bustling life, are af- 
fecting the councils of statesmen, are entering into the 
meditations of the moralists and metaphysicians who 
most despise theology ; in another form are disturbing 
the heart of the country peasant, and of the dweller in 
St. Giles. They are such questions as these — What 
do w^e w^orship? A dream or a real Being? One 
wholly removed from us, or one related to us? . . 
. . What is the evil that I find in myself? Is it my- 
self ? . . . What are these desires which I feel in 
myself for something unseen, glorious and perfect? 
Are they all phantasy or can they be realized? If 
they can, by what means ? Has He to whom they 
point made Himself known to me ? How am I con- 
nected with Him ? Must I utterly renounce all the 
things about me that I may be absorbed into Him, or 
is there any way in which I can devote them and myself 
to Him, and only know Him the better by filling 
my place among them ? These are the great human 
questions : distance in time and space do not affect 
them. 

It is in prayer you must find the answer (to doubt.) 
Yes, in prayer to be able to pray ; in prayer to know 
what prayer is. ... I cannot solve this doubt. I 
can but show you how to get it solved. I can l)iit say 



214 FAITH AND ACTION. 

the doubt itself may be the greatest blessing you ever 
had, may be the greatest striving of God's spirit within 
you that you have ever known, may be the means of 
making every duty more real to you. 

This I take to be tlie first part of the Human or 
Universal Worship, — the acknowledgment in whatever 
forms of speech, by whatever signs, — the most simple 
and universal having most evidence of a divine origin 
— of a Will that is absolutely good, of a Will that has 
sought and is seeking to make men good. . . . 
There is a delight in Truth and Goodness which must 
find an expression that is compatible with awe and 
reverence ; which, as it shrinks from flattering the 
dearest of earthly objects, must be horrified at any 
approach to insincerity towards Him from whom their 
excellence is derived. To be made true is above all 
other things that which you ask of the living and true 
Being. 



VIII. 

FAITH. 

The confidence of a power always at work within us, 
manifesting itself in our powerlessness, a love filling 
up our lovelessness, a wisdom surmounting our folly, the 
knowledge of our own right to glory in this love, power 
and wisdom, the certainty that we can do all righteous 
acts by submitting to this Righteous Being, and that 
we do them best when we walk in a line chosen for us, 
not of our choosing — this is the strength, surely, and 
nothing else, which carries us through earth and lifts 
us into Heaven. 

The Son of God did not acquire obedience by tak- 
ing upon Him our nature. Obedience was His divine 
nature. He endowed ours with it. 

" Peace I leave icith you " has always seemed to me 
nearly the most lovely and blessed sentence in the 
New Testament. That it should be peace itself — not 
peace if our state of mind is fit to receive it, but the 

215 



213 FAITH A::D ALTION. 

gift of tlie state of mind — is very divine. It seems 
Christ giving Himself — (indeed, it must be this.) lie 
is our Peace. 

. . . We say to every man, " Believe in the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and you shalt be saved." Not believe in 
a distant Christ, not believe in a dead Christ; but be- 
lieve in the Lord Jesus Christ. Believe in Him as the 
Lord of your own spirit. Believe that your spirit is as 
much His servant as you have believed it the servant 
of the flesh. Believe Him to be mightier than the 
world around you, than your own flesh, than the evil 
8i>irit. Believe and live. 

Our folly and our misery is, that we do not ask Him 
and trust Him to fultil His promises. Tiiey exceed all 
that we can ask or think. ... In a little time, 
when this world and its fashion have passed away from 
before our eyes, we shall find that it is so. "VVe shall 
find that we had Him with us all through our pilgrim- 
aije : that He was every moment speaking to us, and 
moving us to do right ; every moment warning us of 
the wrong. We shall find that we have erred in hoping 
not too much, but far, far too little ! If we had hoped 
more, we should have been freer, and purer and more 
loving. We have despaired of God's goodness, there- 
fore it has been far from us. 



FAITH. 217 






The Message may come through any man's voice, 
through the parent, the wife, the child. ... It 
may reach us through the letter of a book, or through 
music, or through a picture. It may be brought to us 
through the glory of a sunset or the darkness of a 
night. It may come by fervent expectations or by 
bitter disappointment, by calm joy, or by intense an- 
guish of body or soul. But the source is ever the 
same livinsc "Word of God. 



* , 



Very hard indeed it is for a sick person who is toss- 
ing on his bed and can find no rest, for a lonely man 
who has lost himself on the hills at night, to believe 
that the sun will ever rise. But the sun does rise, and 
fill the world with his lio-ht. So when we feel our 
own evils, and when we look on all the wrongs and 
oppressions of the world, we cannot help fancying 
tiiat the Deliverer is very far away and has forgotten 
us. But He is not far away ; He has not forgotten us. 
And St. John tells every sufferer, and every man who 
feels the burden of his sins, how he may find that out. 
" Abide," he says, " in Christ. . . . Get into the 
way of asking His hel]) in your troubles : get into 
the way of asking Him to keep you from doing wrong 
things and to lielp you to do what is right." 



21S FAITH AND ACTION. 



* 



When we find out that we have this Friend, this 
Healer, this Life-giver, so close to us, and that we may- 
turn to Him and confess all that is oppressing us, — 
all that we are most ashamed of in the past of our 
lives — when we believe that He is such an one, and 
that He can understand us, and that He can heal us, 
then our lives become altosrether different. Then we 
can become simple honest brave men, who do not want 
to hide anything from our Maker. 



* 



AVill anything less than this divine fire, than this 
Divine Spirit, suffice for our renovation? Will it 
avail us to talk of the meek and lowly Jesus? Do 
we not kqow tliat we may talk of Him and think our- 
selves much better for talking of Him, and may boast 
of our superiority to others who do not know Him, till 
all meekness and gentleness depart from us? 



* 



. . . I do not think it is right to expect trials. 
When they are to come, God will fit us for them. 



* 



It seems to nie that all relations acquire a signifi- 
cance, and become felt as actually living and real, 
when contemplated in Him, which out of Him, even 
to the most intensely affectionate, they cannot have. 
At first eacli relation seems to be a step in a beautiful 



FAITH. 219 



ladder set upon earth and reaching to Hhn, prefigur- 
ing that heavenly relation : and afterwards, if that top 
step be apprehended, a descending ladder set in heaven 
and reaching to earth. 



The gift did not depend upon the desciples power of 
seeing Him; He had left it with them. ... It was 
a store to which thej might have recourse, not in sunny 
hours . . . but in times of weariness and desola- 
tion. It was a store . . . for their hearts to feed 

upon ; ... it was His peace, not theirs. 

* 

A really right end involves right means. Therefore 
our faith must be in a present and living God, not in 
any scheme of ours : then He will purge our eyes to 
know Him as the God of Truth. 

It is surely a perilous and almost fatal notion that 
Christian men have less to do with the present than 
the Jews had, that their minds and their religion are 
to be projected into a region after death, because there 
only the Divine Presence is dwelling. Is it possible 
that this is what the writers of the New Testament 
meant when they proclaimed that the Son of God had 
taken flesh and become man, and that henceforth the 
Lord God would dwell with men and walk with them, 
and that they should be His children, and He would 



220 FAITH AND ACTION. 

be their Father? Do such words import that the 
world in which God has placed us has lost some of the 
sacred ness which it had before ; . . . that earth 
and heaven are not as much united as when Jacob was 
travelling to the land of the people of the east? . . 
. Surely there must be terrible contradiction in such 
language, a contradiction which cannot fail to exhibit 
itself in our practice, to introduce unreality, insincerity, 
heartlessness into every part of it. 

. . . It is easy for any of us to talk about the 
troubles and sorrows that men pass through in body 
and mind and spirit. But we shall only sympathize 
with them, as St. Paul did, when we have his faith 
and hope. 

* 

* * 

We know that we will to do right things and, if we 
only believe that that will belongs to Christ, and is 
that inmost thing tliat lie loves and is fighting for, we 
shall be able to do what is otherwise impossible. 

# 

* * 

Oh, if one had to depend upon the state of one's 
feelings, changes of one's temperament ! If God left 
us to these ! But He is, and therefore may we trust 
Him at all times and in all places, and in all moods of 
mind. 



FAITH. 221 



* 



Our eyes are not formed to create liglit, but to re- 
ceive it : if they will close themselves to that which is 
always seeking to open them and illuminate them, that 
is the sentence, — that is the condemnation. 

. . . These two thouohts tog-ether — the Divine 
Love perfected and manifested in submission and sac- 
rifice, the human sympathy with all actual sorrows, — 
seem to me to constitute the mystery of Passion AYeek. 

I am sure that many times I should have sunk utterly 
under the feeling of utter hopeless vanity of mind, of 
dreariness in the affections, feebleness in the will, if 
the words "I believe in the Holy Ghost" had not 
been given me as an exjDression of the best thing I 
could believe in, and that out of which all other belief 
mioht come. 



^ 



o 



# 
* * 



It is worse than madness to fall in love with lies ; to 
say they are so pretty that we cannot part with them, 
to supjDOse that we have no means of testing the gold 
and the alloy. 



* , 



To know God is eternal life ; not to know Him is 
eternal death. That belief, thoroughly and heartily 
entertained, instead of making us uncharitable, would 



222 FAITH AND ACTION. 

be the very ground and root of our charity. God is 

the perfect charity. 

* 

" He who comes that His sheep might have life, and 
that they might have it more abundantly^'' does not 
teach us to talk of ourselves as His sheep and of other 
men as having no part in Him. This is the teaching 
. . . of those who would persuade us that it is a 
privilege to have a selfish, separate life, — to have sel- 
fish, separate rewards. This selfish, separate life is 
"what Christ promises to save us from. The wide, free 
pastures into which He would lead us are those upon 
which we can only graze, because we are portions of a 
flock: the fold into which He would bring us is for 
those whom He has redeemed from their separate err- 

ings and strayings to rest together in Him. 

* 

I am sure that, if the Gosi)el is not regarded as a 
message to all mankind of the redemption which God 
has effected in His Son : if the Bible is thought to be 
speaking only of a world to come, and not of a King- 
dom of Rijjhteousness and Peace and Truth with 
which we may be in conformity or in enmity now : if 
the Church is not felt to be the hallower of all profes- 
sions and occupations, the bond of all classes, the in- 
strument of reforming abuses, the admonisher of the 
rich, the friend of the poor, the asserter of the glory 



FAITH. 223 

of that humanity which Christ bears, — tee are to 
blame, and God will call us to account as unfaithful 
stewards of His treasures. 

All false religion proceeds from the notion that man 
is to make his way up to God by certain acts, or by a 
certain faith of his, instead of receiving God's witness 
of Himself, and yielding to His government. 

The starting-point of the Gospel as I read it, is the 
absolute love of God; the reward of the Gospel is 
the knowledsre of that love. 

Whitsuntide brings with it such pledges of the con- 
tinual presence of the Comforter, of a life arising out 
of death, of fellowship with all in Heaven and all on 
earth, as must needs make every birthday a beautiful 
witness and symbol of the new birth of ourselves and 
of all creation, of the ultimate deliverance of every- 
thing that has in it decay or death. 

T believe . . . that we are really surrounded by 
all that we have lost. I do not think that we bring 
them to us by our thoughts and recollections, but that 
they are present with us, and that we should believe it 
more if we believed that God was with us. 



224 FAITH AND ACTION. 






I suppose we must be trained to understand Christ's 
doctrine in the same school. Till we have been under 
His discipline, we shall have the temper of hirelings, 
counting His work a hardship, expecting to be paid 
hereafter for consenting to do it. Or else we shall 
look for instant harvests — for mighty effects to follow 
at once from the things that we speak — for those 
fruits which least manifest the calm, patient, loving 
will of God, and therefore bring no true and inward 
satisfaction to the spirit of a man. We must learn to 
see in the seed that same eternal life which is in the 
perfect flower and fruit — to believe that God will 
brinix the one out of the other: otherwise, we shall 
have much excitement and much weariness, but no 
food which can sujjport us, no joy which will con- 
nect us with the ages that are past and the ages to 
come. 



* 



The Holy Spirit . . . will not allow us to be 
satisfied with our advanced knowledge or great dis- 
coveries, but will always be showing us things that are 
coming: giving us an apprehension of truths that we 
have not yet reached. . . . The Spirit leads men 
away from that incessant poring over the operations, 
and experiences of their inner life, which is unhealthy 
and morbid, to dwell upon the events which are con- 



FAITH. 225 



tinually unfolding themselves in God's world under 
His providence. 



* 



That the Kingdom of Pleaven is within us, not 
throuo'h some effort of ours to believe in it, but be- 
cause it has always been — when we knew it and 
dreamed of it least, — I am more and more convinced. 
When our Lord said " It is at hand," He surely meant 
this. He came that He might make us know where it 
is, and might turn us to it from all the things that have 
kept us from it, and yet have been illuminated by it. 

In one way or another, I fancy, we are all taught, 
or to be taught, this lesson. Pain, I doubt not . . 
. is one of the great books out of which it is gath- 
ered ; but different methods are chosen by the School- 
Master. 

* 

" I saio the Lord also sitting on a throne., and his 
train filled the temple.'''' Some of you may have been 
watching a near and beautiful landscape in the land 
of mountains and eternal snows, till you have been 
exhausted by its very ricliness, and till the distant hills 
which bounded it have seemed, you know not why, to 
limit and contract the view, and then a veil has been 
withdrawn, and new hills, not looking as if they be- 
longed to this earth, yet giving another character to 
all that does belong to it, have unfolded themselves 



226 FAITH AND ACTION, 

before you. This is an im})erfect likeness ... of 
that revelation which must have been made to the 
inner eye of tlje prophet, when he saw another throne 
than the throne of the house of David, another king 
than Uzziah or Jotham, another train than that of 
priests or minstrels in the temple, other winged forms 
than those golden ones which ovei*shadow" the mercy- 
seat. . . . The kings of the house of David 
reigned, because that king was reigning, whom God 
had set upon His holy hill of Zion : because lie lived 
on when they dropped one and another into their 
graves ; because in Ilim dwelt the light and power by 
which each might illumine his own darkness, sustain 
his own weakness. The symbols and services of the 
temple were not, as priests and people often thought, 
an earthly machinery for scaling a distant heaven ; they 
were witnesses of a heaven nigh at hand, of a God 
dwelling in the midst of His people, of His being sur- 
rounded by spirits which do His pleasure, hearkening 

to the voice of His words. 

* 
* * 

. . . It is true of earthly symbols, still more of 
heavenly visions, that they are meant to carry us out 
of words and above words ; not so that we desj)i8e 
them, or think lightly of them, but thjit we, seeing the 
reality of the invisible, may not be gi'eatly di8turl)ed 
by the processes and conceits of our own minds. 



FAITH. 227 



* 



If there is a Son of Man, one in whom all human 
feelings, sympathies, affections, reach their highest 
point, one from whom they have been derived, . . . 
then the betrayer of that Son of Man exhibits the re- 
volt against tliese feelings, affections, and sympathies, 
the strife against this love, in which every false friend 
may read the ground and the possible consummation 
of his own baseness. . . . Whatever pain and 
inward anguish any have experienced from the insin- 
cerity of those who have eaten their bread and lifted 
up the heel against them, must have been undergone 
by Jesus with an intensity proportioned to the intensity 
of His love. Surely this reflection, if we follow it 
out, may help us more to such an apprehension of His 
sufferings, as it is permitted and possible for us to 
have, than any phrases of pompous rhetoric which 
put Him at a distance from us, and make us suppose 
that He did not bear our griefs and carry our sins. 



* 
* # 



Try to be true thyself ; resist the powers which are 
tempting thee to go through thy acts, common or 
sacred, as if thou wert a mere machine ; hold fast thy 
faith that God is, and is working when thou seest 
least of His working, and when the world seems most 
to be going on without Him ; assure thyself that there 
is an order in the universe when all its movements 



228 FAITH AND ACTION. 

seem most disorderly. So will the things around thee 
by degrees acquire a meaning and a purpose. Those 
divine services and sacraments which have partaken 
of their insincerity, which have become shadows like 
them, will show thee what a truth and substance lies 
behind them. 

If we are now the sons of God, we may leave Him 
to settle what we shall be, in what exercises we shall 
be engaged, M'hat special tasks shall be assigned us. 
The comfort is to think that He will be the orderer of 
us and our ways, and not anyone else; that we may 
look forward to do His commandments, hearkening 
unto the voice of His words : that it is His will to 

break all fetters which hinder us from His free service. 

* 

This doctrine of a divine compulsion acting upon 
the heart and will of a man, of a wisdom ordaining 
every step for him, of a love imposing upon him duties 
which of himself he would be least willing to under- 
take, bearincr him on to sufferinajs from which he 
would most shi-ink, is the one . . . which every 
minister of Christ and every Christian man must, by 
one discipline or another, be taught. 

* * 
The Old Testament civilization was, I take it, 

gi'ounded upon the j)rinciple that God has made men 



FAITH. 229 

in His image, and that He is not made in theirs : the 
New Testament civilization upon the ground that 
the full image of God has been revealed in a Man, 
and that there is a power going forth to act upon the 
whole being and nature of men, for the sake of raising 
them and conformins: them to that imaoe. 

It is true of all symbols that we can know but little 
of them at first. The experience of life interprets 
them. And it is the hardest thing of all for us to be- 
lieve that the Highest must wait upon the lowest ; 
that it is not humility, but pride to refuse the service. 
Wonderful thought to take in ! God must stoop, or 
man cannot stoop. We must set ourselves up as gods 
unless we believe that God's glory is shown in doing 
the lowest offices of a man. 

I do not think we can exas»2:erate the blessins; that 
it would be to . . . all of us if we simply accej^ted 
the sacrifice of Christ and lived upon it. 

We say we wish to bring the sinner, weary, heavy- 
laden and hopeless, to Christ. What can be a more 
blessed, or more benevolent, or more divine desire? 
But do we mean that we merely wish to bring the sin- 
ner to know what Christ did and spoke, in those 
thirty-three years between His birth and His resurrec- 



230 FAITH AXD ACTION. 

tion? I fear we shall never understand the infinite 
significance of those years, or be able to take the Gos- 
pel narrative of them simply as they stand, if we have 
no other thought than this, or if there is no other 
which we dare joroclaim to our fellow-men. Do we 
not really believe that Christ was, before He took hu- 
man flesh and dwelt anions: us? ... Is this a 
mere arid dosrma . . . which has nothin<x to do 
with our inmost convictions, with our very life ? How 
has it become so ? Is it not because we do not accept 
the New Testament explanation of these appearances 
and manifestations; because we do not believe that 
Christ is in every man, the source of all light that ever 
visits him, the root of all the righteous thoughts and 
acts that he is ever able to conceive or to do ? 

All the Evangelists agree in connecting faith in the 
subject with most, if not all, these acts of power, (mira- 
cles). Now if the miracles were merely, or chiefly, 
evidences of a divine mission, . . . one would 
rather have expected that the displays would have 
been most startling and overwhelming]: where the un- 
belief was most obstinate. . . . Whereas, if these 
signs and powers wera but the tokens and manifesta- 
tions of the presence of One who came to claim the 
human 8j)irit as His subject, and to raise it out of sub- 
jection to other masters, we perceive at once that there 



FAITH. 231 

is something more regal and more mysterious in an act 
which calls out the man himself into trust and hope, 
than in that wliich merely rectifies the energies of his 
body or even of his mind. Not only the limb is 
straightened, not only the issue of blood is staunched, 
but the person who wields the limb, through whose 
veins the blood flows, is called into existence and 
health by the voice of the life-giver. 

That righteous King of your heart whom you have 
felt to be so near you, so one with you, that you could 
hardly help identifying Him with yourself, even while 
you confessed that you were so evil. He is the Re- 
deemer as well as the Lord of you and of man. . . 
. He has taught you that you have been in chains, 
but that you have been a willing wearer of the chains. 
To break them. He must set you free. Self is your 
great prison-house. The strong man, armed, who 
keeps that prison in safety, must be bound. 

. . . We must be content that the knowledo^e of 
Him should evolve itself slowly in our minds: we must 
be thankful if any perplexities and sorrows, from 
within or from without, prepare us for it. The Name 
of Him who was born of the Virgin may be familiar 
to us, it may be surrounded with many beautiful and 
venerable associations, it may recall moments of youth- 



232 FAITH AND ACTION. 

fill tenderness, or remorse, or enthusiasm. And yet it 
may rather hover about our minds than he rooted in 
them : we may be trying by acts of memory, or fancy, 
or strong passionate efforts of what we call faith, to 
bind it to us more closely. AVhat we want, I think, is 
to know the barrenness and hollowness of our own 
selves. If there is not some One beneath ourselves, 
the ground of all that we desire and believe and an>, 
the spring of our hopes and the consummation of 
them, the fountain of all love in every creature and 
the satisfaction of its love, life is a very miserable 
sleep, full of turbulent, broken dreams. 

" The just shall live by his faith.'''' There lies the 
secret of the life of an Israelite ; he shall live by his 
faith. Feeling and knowing himself to be nothing, he 
is obliged to cast himself wholly upon God. And any- 
thing which takes away that self-confidence, and any- 
thing which brings forth that faith, is blessed, is 
divine, let the outward aspects of it be as dark, let 
the inward anguish which it produces, be as terrible as 
it may. Here is the solution of the riddles of the 
universe; here is the key to God's dark and inscrutable 
ways. Not a solution which we can resort to as if it 
were a fonnula of ready application, which may stifle 
questioning and set our minds at ease. Xot a key 
such as empirics and diviners use, pretending that they 



FAITH. 2^3 



know all the wards of every mystery, and can open it 
at their pleasure, but one to which the humble and 
meek can always resort when most baffled, when most 



io;norant. 



* 



See if the one thought of a living and righteous Be- 
ing — working amidst the changes of time, working 
upon human wills for a loving and gracious purpose, 
working for a i)uri30se which has been realized — does 
not give you a power of understanding facts which 
you were content to leave unexplained, does not enable 
you to bear your ignorance of those which you cannot 
explain. I do not say that it will be so if you are not 
convinced that the perfect ideal of Humanity has been 
brought forth ; that a Man, who perfectly submitted 
that the clay which He bore should be moulded ac- 
cording to the will of an Almighty Father, is the cen- 
tre of Human Life, Society, History. But I am sure, 
if that faith is fully received into your hearts that the 
weary maze will become a blessed order, and that you 
will think of the condition of your race and of its 
members with a sympathy and a hope which . . . 
only the God of Sympathy and Hope and Consolation 
can bestow. 

When I began in earnest to seek God for myself, 
the feeling that I needed a deliverer from an over- 



234 FAITH AND ACTION. 

whelming weight of selfishness was the predominant 
one in my mind. ... I thought He was just that 
Being who was exhibited in the cro&s of Jesus Christ. 
If I might believe His words, " JTe that hath seen me 
hath s€e?i the Father ;'''^ if, in His death, the whole 
wisdom and power of God did shine forth, there was 
one to whom I miglit fly from the demon of Self, 
there was one who could break his bonds asunder. 

That was and is the ground of my Faith, 

* 

In the sad hours of your life, the recollection of that 
Man you read of in your childhood, the Man of Sor- 
rows, the great sympathizer with human woes and 
sufferings, rises up before you : it has a reality for you 
then : you feel it to be not only beautiful, but true. 
In such moments, does it seem to you that Christ was 
merely a person who, eighteen hundred years ago, 
made certain journey ings between Judea and Galilee ? 
Can such a recollection fill up the blank which some 
present grief, the loss of some actual friend, has made 
in your hearts? It does not, it never did this for any 
one ! Yet I do not doubt for a single instant, that a 
comfort has come to you from that contemplation. So 
far from denying }'our right to it, I would wish you 
and all earnestly to believe how strong and assured 
our right to it is. In Him, and for Him, we were crea- 
ted ; this is our doctrine, or rather the doctrine of 



FAITH. 235 

St. Paul. ... If so, is it wonderful that He should 
speak to you, and tell you of Himself ? And oh ! if 
that voice says, "You may trust me, you may lean 
upon me, for I know all things in heaven and earth — 
T and my leather are one^'' is the whisper too good to 
be true, too much in accordance with the timid antici- 
pations and longings of our spirits not to be rejected? 

When we are ashamed of our strifes, of our indif- 
ference, of our vainglory, of our money-worship, when 
we have asked God to put these away from us, to give 
us true hearts, and to write His name and the name of 
the Holy City upon us ; we shall understand how our 
fathers saw some letters of that name in every part of 
the universe. . . . But we shall believe, not be- 
cause of their word, but because we have seen for our- 
selves ; because we have the Kingdom of God within 
us : because we have Christ Himself to interpret the 
parables of it. 

No one, I believe, has ever doubted that the old 
garment and the old bottles referred to the institutions 
of the ancient economy ; the new garment and the 
new bottles, to those which Christ would establish. 
Every one has seen that, in some way or other, our 
Lord meant to say, that it would be mischievous 
merely to re-enact the forms and customs which had 



236 FAITH AND ACTION. 

belonged to the past, until the substance and the life, 
of which customs and foi*ms are the outside, had been 
brouo;ht out and revealed. But surelv , if His Kincrdom 
were not tlie everlastinij Kins^dora which all Jewish in- 
stitutions had been imperfectly exhibiting, these coni- 
parisons and the argument which is founded upon 
them would not hold good. He would be substituting 
new bottles for the old, not expressing the wine which 
was to fill the bottles. No more beautiful illustration 
could be conceived of the assertion that the Kinsrdora 
of God, when it had once unfolded itself, would work 
out a drapery fitted for itself, and that it would not 
merely make use of that drapeiy which belonged to it 
when it was yet undeveloped. 

Every variation in the story of the Agony is de- 
servinc: of the'most careful observation and reflection. 
. . . I have nothinc: to add to what thousands have 
said of it ; and it is after all what has not been said of 
it, the unuttered, unutterable experience of human be- 
ings in all kinds and states of suffering for eighteen 
h^T'idred years, which has brought out its meaning. I 
think T might safely leave it to that experience to de- 
clare whether the word " Father " has not been felt to 
contain the very essence of the sorrow and the conso- 
lation. . . . Tlie intensity of the sorrow is surely 
in this, that it is filial sorrow, the distinct will of the 



FAITH. 237 

Son coming forth as if it were something separate 
and alone, yet striving in the agony of prayer to sub- 
mit itself — to claim its perfect essential unity with 

the Father's will Who does not feel that the 

very secret of the power and life of the Gospel is 
lying there ? 

I find some spirits in different places of this earth 
very miserable, and others in a certain degree of bless- 
edness. I do not find that the place in which they 
are makes the difference. ... I should con- 
clude from these observations, if I had nothing else to 
guide me, that the moral and spiritual condition of the 
inhabitants is the means of making a heaven or a hell 
of this earth. Scripture sustains this conclusion. All 
it tells me of the Kingdom of Heaven shows me tliat 
man must anywhere be blessed, if he has the knowl- 
edge of God and is living as His willing subject: 
everywhere accursed, if he is ignorant of God and at 
war with Him. 

(The Apostles') prayer for an increase of Faith, 
plausible as it sounded, Our Lord seems to tell us 
was itself mixed with covetous desires, which are the 
great antagonists of faith ; they wanted to have a great 
amount of faith, not that they might serve God with 
it, but themselves. They wanted faith as a something 



238 FAITH AND ACTION. 

upon which they could plume themselves, and which 
would set them above others : they must learn that 
God gives men faith that they may do His work, not 
that they may have a feast of their own. 

Evil must be denounced at all hazards, and that 
which is wTong in the tendencies of a time can only 
be effectually resisted by the assertion of the right 
which is most akin to it. This is faith and (those who 
hold it) are in the true sense " just by faith." Their 
outward acts proceed from a principle ; that principle 
is Trust in an unseen Person. 

Each of us is disposed to fix upon some one of our 
Lord's statements, as that to wliich he shall refer all 
the rest. If we desire to have our thoughts orderly, 
not loose and incoherent, . . . there must be a 
centre round which they revolve. But it is unspeak- 
ably important tliat we should not choose this centre 
and so create a system for ourselves ; but that we 
should find it. . . . Will anyone say that I am 
wrong if I affirm that God himself is the centre here, 
that the Love with which He loved the world is that 
to which our Lord is leading us, that if we learn fiom 
Him what that love is ... we shall be in a better 
condition to apprehend all that He is teaching us 
respecting the birth from above? 



FAITH. 239 






I plead for the Love of God, which resists sin and 
triumphs over it, not for a mercy which relaxes the 
penalties of it. With continual effort^ only by the help 
of that revelation of God which is made in the Gos- 
pel of Christ, I am able to believe that there is a might 
of Good which has overcome Evil. . . . To main- 
tain this conviction, to believe in the Love of God, 
in spite of the appearances which the world presents 
and the reluctance of my own nature, I find to be the 
great fight of life. ... I admire unspeakably 
those who can believe in the Love of God and can love 
their brethren in spite of the opinion which they seem 
to cherish, that He has doomed them to destruction. I 
am sure that their faith is as much purer and stronger 
than mine, as it is than their own system. ... I 
do not call upon them to deny anything they have 
been wont to hold ; but I call upon them to join us in 
acknowledging God's Love and His redemption first of 
all, and then to consider earnestly what is or is not 
compatible with that acknowledgment. 



* 
* * 



If we believed that there had been a SjDirit of Truth, 
not acting upon the surface of men's minds, but carry- 
ing on a controversy with them in their inmost being, 
encountering all the rebellions of the cowardly, reluc- 
tant Will, all its desire to become a mere Self-will, 



240 FAITH AND ACTION. 

bringing out its darkness, as light always must, into 
fuller and stronger relief ; . . . if we could believe 
that this was a Comforter, a Divine Person, stronger 
than His enemies, able to strengthen man to all fixed 
resolutions and noble purposes; . . . able to in- 
spire longings and hopes when the spirit of man is most 
bent and cowed ; able to point him upward to a 
Father in Heaven when lie is most ready to call him- 
self only a son of earth ; able at the same time to make 
him understand his work on earth, and to endow him 
with powers for performing it ; able to support him in 
suffering ; to give him glimpses of the substantial glory 
into which Christ has entered through suffering; able 
to make him perceive that everything which is merely 
his own is perishable, that what is most divine is com- 
mon to him with his fellows; — then I think we need 
not choose the bright spots of modern history and con- 
ceal its horrors ; the more courageously we face the one, 
the more hope will come to us from the contemplation 
of the other. 

. . . Why have the sects . . . become so 
partial, so hard, so cruel? Is it because their fore- 
fathers were wrong in telling them that the Spirit was 
seeking to bind them in one, and that no mere ex- 
ternal bond could bind them ? Surely not ; this lesson, 
taken home to the heart, makes men first true, in due 



FAITH, 241 

time Catholic, leading them to cling mightily to the 
special conviction God has wrought in them, after- 
wards enabling them to feel the necessity of other con- 
victions to sustain that. It is the loss of this faith, it 
is the substitution of some petty external badge and 
symbol of theirs, for the belief and confession of a 
Divine Spirit, which is making them impatient of 
dogmas, yet fiercely dogmatic ; eager to rob other men 
of their treasures ; feeble in their hold upon their own. 

The Church does not maintain in one prayer, but in 
all its prayers, that the love of God is the only root and 
ground of Christ's Atonement and that the perfect 
submission of the Son to the will of the Father consti- 
tutes the deepest meaning of the Sacrifice. These 
principles belong to the essence of our faith. 

You cannot trust God too much. You cannot be 
too confident that He is guiding you, and that every 
embarrassment in your thoughts, every complication in 
your circumstances, is known by Him, is intended by 
Him as a means to enable you to understand wisdom 
secretly, that you may show forth the fruits of it 
openly. . . . Faith in the righteousness of God 
gives you that prudence or providence which will 
make you wary of your footsteps, suspicious of your- 
selves. Faith in the righteousness of God gives you 



242 FAITH AND ACTION. 

that courage which will enable you to move on stead- 
ily, calmly, resolutely, certain that you will have light 
to see what you ought to do, and that, in doing it, 
you will know more of the just and gracious mind of 
God towards all men as well as towards yourselves. 

. . . Seeing what appear to us the most irregular 
currents obey a fixed and eternal law, we may be sure 
that that Spirit of Truth will work as He has always 
worked ; that He will change nothing and yet will make 
all things new. That mighty wonder which we behold 
every year when the self-same roots and stems, which 
Were the symbols of all that is hard and dry and sepa- 
rate become clothed with verdure, full of life and joy 
and music, will be exhibited in the moral world. No 
form will be cast away, no ordinance will be treated as 
Worthless, nothing which has expressed the thought or 
belief of any man will be found unmeaning, because the 
Spirit of the living God will call forth every sleeping 
and latent power into activity, ev^erything that has 
been dead into life ; all that has been divided into har- 
mony. Only the miserable counterfeits will pass away. 
Whatever has been true, if it has been ever so weak 

and broken, will find its place. 

* 

Everyone must, I think, at some moment of his life, 
have been startled by the wonderful force of the words 



FAITH. 243 

in Scripture with which he has been most familiar and 
which had seemed to him most commonplace. For 
instance the word " trust " which meets ns at every 
turn in the Book of Psalms. In overwhelming trou- 
bles, in a time of utter weariness, when every calcula- 
tion has been disappointed, when there sefems no fair 
ground for expecting help from any quarter, when all 
is dark within and without, how has this little word 
dawned upon a man, what a witness it has seemed to 
give of a world of liglit somewhere, perhaps not far off ! 
. . . To fear God he knew was right, whether he 
did it, or no ; to love God he had always held to be 
right, if it were possible. But to trust in Gorl, with- 
out being certain that he does either fear or love ; to 
trust because all is in God which he has not and feels 
he has not, in himself, this is precisely what he needs, 
and precisely to this the book ... is inviting 
him. 

The expression . . . that the Son of God recon- 
ciled the Father to us, has pained many who have seen 
tlie unmeasurable importance of recognizing all love as 
proceeding from the Father, and having its root in 
Hira. ... If the idea of satisfaction as the fruit 
of Love, as the image of Love in the Son, answering 
to the archetype of it in the Father, were filling our 
minds, there would be no difficulty in admitting the 



244 FAITH AND ACTION. 

assertion that the Son reconciled the Father to us. 
He presented that perfect reflex of His own character to 
the Father, with which He alone could be satisfied. In 
Him only could He see Humanity as He had formed it, 
with all its powers in full exercise, free and glorious, — 
free and glorious because entirely submissive to love. 
. . . Christ alone offered himself a complete sacri- 
fice, not to necessity, not to the tyranny of Death, but to 
Love. He had power to lay down His life. He gave 
it up. "Wherein had all creatures failed ? Simply in 
this: they had not trusted God. They had not yielded 
themselves to Him, relying upon His love, casting 
themselves unreserv^edly upon it. . . . Self divided 
their hearts with love, sometimes wholly vanquished it. 
. . . None ever showed forth HLs whole character ; 
none ever sympathized with the whole human kind, 
and with each member of it; none ever felt towards 
their brethren as the Father of all felt to them. 
Therefore none of them could destroy the sej)aration 
between God and His creation. . . . Only the Son 
could reconcile the Father to men ; could make human- 
ity wholly acceptable to a wholly loving Being. But 
was this reconciliation a change of His mind ? Did it 
make His character other than it was before, or His 
feelings towards our race more gracious ? No ; for the 
very complacency of God was for this, that His charac- 
ter could now first be seen in One who bore our nature ; 



FAITH. 245 



that His purposes of grace to us could now first be 
accomplished in One who called us brethren. 



* 
* * 



There is an abstract way of thinking about the Son 
of God, which is hurrj-ing some of us into Pantheism. 
. . . There is a popular way of thinking about the 
Son of God, which is hurrying us into idolatry. . . . 
Nor do I see how either evil can be averted if we do 
not more earnestly consider what is involved in the 
faith of little children. . . . If we were forced to 
form conceptions about a Son of God, or Son of 
Man, there would be a perpetual strife of intellects ; 
there could be no consent ; each man mast think 
differently from his neighbor, must try to establish 
his own thouscht asfainst his neio-hbor's. If He is re- 
vealed to us as the ground of our intellects, — the cre- 
ative Word of God from whom they derive their 
light ; as the centre of our fellowship, the only-be- 
gotten Son of God, in whom we are made sons of 
God, the weary effort is over: our thoughts may 
travel to the ends of the earth, but here is their 
home ; apart from Him men have infinite disagree- 
ments ; in Him they have peace. 



* 
* * 



Instead of picturing to ourselves some future bliss, 
calling that Eternal Life, and determining the worth 
of it by a number of years, or centuries, or milleniums, 



246 FAITH AND ACTION. 

we are bound to say once for all : " This is the eternal 
life, that which Christ has brought ^Yith Ilim, that 
which we have in Him, the knowledge of God ; the 
entering into His mind and character, the knowing 
Him as we only can know any person, by sympathy, 
fellowship, love." 

Sacrifice is the common root and uniting bond and 
reasonable explanation of all those acts which seem in 
the eyes of men, often in the eyes of those who per- 
form them, most hostile to each other, but which God 
sees to be essentially alike. . . . But Sacrifice 
cannot have this ennobling and mysterious power — 
it will be turned into self-glory and lose its own nat- 
ure, . . . if it is not contemplated as all flowing 
from the nature of God ; if it is not referred to Him 

as its author as well as its end. 

* 

We often make a great and painful effort to realize, 
as we call it, our Lord's sufferings, to think how tran- 
scendently great they must have been, hoping in that 
way to kindle our sorrow and devotion. The result, 
I think, is generally disappointment. We rarely work 
ourselves up to the point we wish ; if we do, there 
comes a strong reaction afterwards. The Church 
teaches us to avoid such carnal strii2:2:les. It is hu- 
mility we want, not exaltation. It is in submission to 



FAITH. 247 

love, not in striving to understand it, and to measure 
its workings, that we enter into our Lord's mind, and 
follow His example. The person who most simply 
confesses his own want of charity, and desires to rest 
himself and all upon the infinite Charity of God . . . 
will see most into the divine meanins: of the Passion. 






The curse which the Law pronounced upon men 
was death, death in its most odious, most criminal 
shape ; and He underwent it, an actual, not a fantastic 
crucifixion, — the sentence of the rebel and the slave. 
Do you ask how this act effected the purpose of re- 
deeming any, or how many were included in the 
benefits of it? The question is, indeed, most diflScult, 
if by redemption you understand iii any sense the de- 
liverance of man out of the hand of God, the pro- 
curing a change in His purpose or will ; then there is 
need of every kind of subtle explanation to show how 
the means corresjiond to tlie end. But if you suppose 
that it is the spirit of a man which needs to be eman- 
cipated, a spirit fast bound with the chains of its own 
sins and fears, then I do not see what proof, save one, 
can be of any avail, that a certain scheme of redemp- 
tion is effectual. ... If the spiritual bondage is 
not real, of course the spiritual redemption is not real. 
But the whole history of the world, of every portion 
of the world, for six thousand years, proclaims that it 



248 FAITH AND ACTlOy. 

is real. ... If the way of deliverance from it has 
been found out in some corner of the world, civilized 
or uncivilized . . . then let us know the way, let 
us try it. But the sacrifices that ascend from ten 
thousand altars to powers of sky and earth and air, 
. . . declare : " We have not found it ; we never 
shall till you can tell us of some sacrifice which shall 
be of God ; one which proceeds from His will and not 
ours ; one which fulfils His will and not ours." It is 
such an one of which St. Paul speaks when he de- 
clares that " Christ has redeemed us from the curse of 

the Laic, having become a curse for us?'' 

* 

Is it nothing to think, that every true and faithful 
man who has ever wrestled with his own evil, and with 
the evil of his brethren . . . has been Christ's 
soldier, cheered by His voice ; inspired by His spirit ? 
Is it nothing to think that you have seen but the be- 
ginning of their warfare, — when they were just learn- 
ing the use of their arras and wielding them very 
awkwardly; but that now they have entered upon a 
new stage of their service, and have profited by their 
sorrowful experience and many failures, and rule the 
things to which they often yielded subjection, and 
confess and obey the Leader, from whose yoke they 
so often broke loose? Is it nothing to believe that 
now they appreciate each other better, and are not mis- 



FAITH. 249 

led by appearances, and are not separated by hard 
thoughts, but feel that a common bond unites them, 
that the same banner is over them, and that they have 
been purified by the same blood from the vain wishes 
and petty vanities which kept them asunder? Is it 
nothing to think that now they understand us and 
sympathize with us as they could not do before ; be- 
cause, if they are more awake to our evils, they are 
more earnest to deliver us from them ; and because 
they see us no longer as separate from Him who has 
loved them and us and given Himself for us ? . . . 
Do not conceive of them as dwelling in some distant, 
unknown region, where they possess some felicity from 
which you are excluded. Think of them as still 
caring for the earth, and for the country, and village, 
and homestead in which they learnt their lessons of 
humility and trust ; think of them as struggling that 
these may become fit habitations for Righteousness 
and Peace to dwell in. 

"We speak scornfully and disparagingly of this 
earth as if it were a fit place for poor fallen wicked 
creatures to inhabit ; but as if those whom the Spirit 
makes meet for the Kingdom of Heaven were to look 
down upon it ; at best to regard it only as a place in 
which they are compelled for threescore years and ten 
to dwell. These words stand out often in the stronor- 



250 FAITH AND ACTION. 

est contrast to the acts of those who use them . . . 
especially their devotion to the earth's money, the love 
of which is said to be the root of all evil. And so I 
believe it must be, more and more, if we are not taught 
reverence for the earth as an article of faith ; if it is 
not declared to us more and more, that the Bible com- 
mands this reverence, gives us the strongest and most 
sacred reasons for it. . . . The earth, so the old 
Hebrews believed, is a grand and awful place, which 
God has created and cared for and pronounced very 
good. ... St. Peter believed that the earth had 
been made evil by those who inhabited it, just because 
they did not recognize its relation to, and dependence 
upon, the Kingdom of Heaven. 

. . . Mahometanism can only thrive while it is 
aiming at conquest. Why? Because it is the proc- 
lamation of a mere Sovereign, wlio employs men to 
declare the fact that he is a Sovereign, and to enforce 
it upon the world. It is not the proclamation of a 
great moral Being who designs to raise his creatures 
out of their sensual and natural degradation ; who re- 
veals to them not merely that He is, but zchat He is — 
why He has created them — what they have to do 
with Him. Unless this mighty chasm in the Mahom- 
etan doctrine can be filled up, it must wither day by 
day — wither for all purposes of utility to mankind. 



FAITH. 251 






You have found a set of men brought up in cir- 
cumstances altogether different from yours, holding 
your faith in abhorrence, who say in language the 
most solemn and decisive, " Whatever else we part 
with, this is needful to us and to all human beings — 
the belief that God is — the recognition of Him as a 
living personal Being." ... Be sure that here is 
something which the heart and reason within you have 
need of — which they must grasp. Be quite sure that, 
if you give them in place of it any fine notions or 
theories ; if you feed them with phrases about the 
beautiful or the godlike when they want the source 
of beauty, the living God ; if you entertain them with 
any images or symbols of art or nature when they 
want that which is symbolized, if you talk about phys- 
ical laws when they want the lawgiver, . . . you 
are cheating yourselves — cheating mankind. 






If we use all arguments of fear, all arts of rhetoric, 
to convince beggars or princes that they ought to take 
care of their souls, a few may be startled out of a sleep 
to which they will return again. But the more part 
will feel that you are setting them upon a task which 
they cannot perform ; . . . that you are bidding 
them forget the real earth for the sake of a heaven 
which they can only dream of. But if, throwing aside 



252 FAITH AND ACTION. 

these metaphysics about the soul, we will recur to the 
old and simjDle scriptural phraseology — the phrase- 
ology of the hearth and the home — if we will bear 
witness to men of a Father who has sent the elder 
Brother of the household to bring them into it, to re- 
store them to the place of sons and daughters, to en- 
dow them with the hisrhest rio^hts of children — if we 
will condescend to this venerable mode of speech, — 
we shall find, I believe, that it is not obsolete, . . . 
but that it has a power which time and place have 
not affected, that it can bring forth as clear a response 
from the peasant and mechanic of the nineteenth cent- 
ury, as from the peasant and mechanic of the first. 
The strength is in the tidings themselves, not in the 
person who delivers them. 

The kingdom of light is mightier than the kingdom 
of darkness. This was the substance of the Persian 
faith, to the revival of which, in all its strength and 
simplicity, all that was vigorous in the Persian char- 
acter and government seems to have been owing. 
There was tlie greatest difference between it and 
the Hindoo — precisely this difference. The Hindoo 
thought of light and darkness as the opposition be- 
tween cultivation and iijnorance — between the Brah- 
min and the Sudra ; the Persian looked upon them as 
expressions for right and wrong. Far less refined and 



FAITH. 253 

intellectual than the Indian, far less capable of mere 
speculation, he had a sense of practical, moral distinc- 
tions to which the other was almost a stranger. . . 
. Hence a difference in their scheme of life. 

■ # 

Whatever is false is feeble and the cause of feeble- 
ness ; whatever is truth must come forth and vindi- 
cate its might before the Universe. We need that 
conviction if we would understand the past ; we need it 
for the work of every day ; we shall hold it more jSrmly 
when we look back upon our present existence from 
that which is to come. 



GENERAL INDEX. 



SUBJECTS. 




PAGE. 


PAGE, 


1 


Art 


. 139 


. 36 


Duty 


. 156 


. 82 


ASPERATION . 


. 183 


. 103 


Faith 


. 215 



Life 
Men 
Refoiois 
Books . 



A 

♦'Abide in Christ" 217 

Addison, characterized by Thackeray .... 41 
Adversity not necessarily beneficial to character . 46, 47 
Age, this, impatient of distinctions, 18, 19 ; of self-cult- 
ure passing away, 41 ; ours a critical age, 134, 137, 138 

Agony in tlie Garden 236 

All relations living through the power of Christ . .218 

Analysis, Self, not desirable 188 

Analytical novel-writing tAT)ical of our age . . 134, 135 
Apocalypse omitted by compilers of Prayer-book . . 124 
Apostle of Love, how represented by painters . . 148 
Apostles, how chosen by Christ, 37 ; their love for Christ, 

45, 46 ; their prayer for increase of faith . . 237, 238 

Aristotle and Plato compared 107 

Arnold, Dr., cit3d 115 

Art of detecting good in fellow-mortals, 2 ; pre-Raph- 

aelite, principle of, 142 ; art, true to Nature . 143, 144 
Art, Works of, the right way to admire, 143 ; honesty in 

judgment of 146, 147 

Aspirations, lofty, man without 60 

Association among Working-men . . . . 88, 94 

Atonement of Christ 241 

Augustine, St., reference to 118 

255 



256 



GENERAL INDEX. 



Bacon, cited, 14; cliaracteristics of .... 49 

Bain, reference to 178 

Balaam, why a false prophet, 39 ; the sin of . . .40 

" Believe in Christ," what it is to 216 

Bentham, cited, 100 ; reference to 179 

Best we can do for our brother 36 

Bible, a revelation of God himself, 108, 109 ; forces us to 
ask questions, 115 ; contains the promise of Progress, 
121 ; Bible commands reverence for the earth 249, 250 



116 

31 

153 

221 



Biographj' 103 ; writer of sliould be an artist 

" Bitterness, Heart knoweth its own " .... 

Blake, the artist, reference to 

Blindness, spiritual, 187 ; wilful 

Books should be friends, 103 ; true test of the immor- 
tality of books, 110; Maurice's own, 111; Books 
should be regarded as utterances of living men 

Boreas and Oreithyia, fable of 

Bottles, old and new, parable of 

Boyhood, aspirations of . 

Bright and hallowed moments in the lives of 

Buckle, plea for Immortality . 

Buddhism, has its lesson for us 

Buddliist and Brahmin compared 

Bunyan, John 

Burke, Johnson's opinion of . . . 

Burns, Robert 

Business of life and best knowledge compatible among 
the working classes, 85 ; inward and outward busi- 
ness 157 

Byron, his " Manfred," 131, 132; reference to . . 137 



smners 



. 136 
. 75 

235, 236 
. 185 
. 13 
. 42 
. 174 
. 72 
. 60 
. 40 
51, 52 



Cain, offering of 194 

Calling of clergjTnen, 160, 166, 171, 172; of lajnnen . 160 



GENERAL INDEX. 257 

Capital and labor . 88-90 

Carlyle's view of Cromwell 48 

Charity, good-natured, 33; Epistle for Quinquagesima 

Sunday on 119, 120 

Chaucer, typical English poet 105 

Christ, doing all in the name of, 23 ; in every man, 23, 183, 
216; chose the Apostles, as witnesses, 37; Christ, 
not Christianity, the teaching of the New Testa- 
ment, 124 ; Christ our home, 183, 184 ; we are all one 
in, 192 ; bringing sinners to, 229, 230 ; our sacrifice 

247, 248 
Christianity, promoter of well-being among the work- 
ing-men, 90 ; the word not found in the New Testa- 
ment 124 



. 87 
connected, 

. 200 
78, 79 
. 149-151 
medley of 

. 67 



Christian Socialism .... 

Church Reformation and Social Reformation 

87 ; prayers of the Church 
Cicero, character of .... 

Cimabue and Giotto, anecdote of 
Circumstances, evil not in, but in ourselves, 1 ; 

our, 30; change of . 
Citizenship, problem of, 66 ; a reality to laboring men . 95 
Civilization of the Old and New Testaments . 228, 229 

Civilized man, distinction between and savage . 70, 71 

Classifying men 68 

Collects, principle of the 195 

" Come unto me all ye that labor " 118 

Common Prayer 199, 200, 202 

Competition leading to anarchy, 88 ; not the law of the 

universe 94 

Comprehension, watchword of our time . . 19, 20 

Conscience, true self, 8 ; appeal to the, in a child, 70, 71 ; 

a disturber of the peace, 98; the meaning of .the 

word, 175, 176; voice of 179 

Contrition 195, 196 

Correggio, reference to 149 

Courage, greatest, united with greatest awe . . .31 



258 



GENERAL INDEX. 



Courage, not natural to us 
Covetousness to be resisted 
Cowardice, spirit of 
Critical age, needs of a . 
Criticism, our age, one of 
Cultivation of bodilj' energies 



. 32 

. 62 
5 

137, 138 
. 134 

. 85 



Danger of exceptional power over others illustrated by 

Savonarola 

David, why a man after God's own heart, 47 ; David's 

acts and prayers, difference between, 59 ; cited 
Decision, day of, in every age .... 

Despondency, not natural to our minds . 

Discipline of Christ 

Disorders of Universe, how rectified 
Distance of time sometimes a help to recollection 
Distinctions, this age impatient of . 
Divine, sentences, power of, learned bj' practice, 13; 
Teacher, treatment of human mistakes by, 17; en- 
dowments, liigh and low, 22; Divine Spirit, what 
we need. 2 IS; compulsion, doctrine of . . . 
Doing good, faculty of, grows hy practice 
Domestic Morality, an integral portion of Social Moral- 
ity, 133; Story characteristic of our time . 132,133 

Doubts may be blessings 213,214 

Drunkard, reform of the 101 

Duties "Mere" 105, 1G6 

Duty, Individual and National, 25 ; of living in the pres- 
ent, 156; of embodying our thoughts in action, 156; 
of testifying for the name of God, 162; freedom of 
duty, 167 ; its strength and nourishment . 



42 

60 
16 
7 
224 
27 
11 
18 



228 
2 



172 



E 



Earh has what he truly craves 
Earth, reverence for the . 



10 
249, 250 



GENERAL INDEX. 



259 



Education, our, given us to help working-class, 13; 

questions of, at the present clay, 91 ; infant and 

adult education, 92 ; among women 
Educators, work of . 
Elizabeth, age of, in literature 
End, right, involves right means 
Epictetus, a freeman, not a slave, 7( 
Eternal life, what it is 
Evils, looking in the face 
Examination, Present System, evils 
Excuses, our, for ourselves 
Exorcist, every one may be an 
Eye not single .... 
" Eyes blinded, hearts hardened" 
Ezekiel, Vision of . 




P 



Faith, hope and love, 156; ground of Maur 
234 ; Strength of ... . 

Faithfulness, reward of daily . 

False religion, its origin .... 

Fellow-men, faith in our, 58 ; appeal to . 

Fielding as a novelist .... 

Flesh, the, and the Spirit 

Forgiveness, God's and man's . 

Freedom of working-men, our aim 

Friend, best worth having 

Friends and servants, difference between, 
friends always with us . . . 

Froude, History of England . 

Fuller, Thomas 



ice's 



46; 



own, 
220, 233 
227 
223 
163 
134, 135 
43 
19 
96 
36 



dead 



223 
110 
106 



Gainsborough, reference to 
Galileo, cited 



G 



153 
81 



260 



GENERAL INDEX, 



Generosity, True, only that whicli looks for no reward 3 

Gibbon, as an historian, our obligations to . . . 126 

Gift, the one abiding 12 

Giotto and Cimabue, anecdote of . . . . 149-151 

Gladstone, face of 49 

God, the centre of Our Lord's statements, 238 ; God's 
forgiveness, and man's forgiveness, 19 ; our thoughts 

of God, 30 ; His Will be done 192 

Goethe, perfect type of the age of self -culture . . 41 

Goldschmidt, Mrs., reference to 141 

Good, all, carries us beyond itself 2 

Gospel of St. Matthew, 118, 119; of St. Luke, 119; of 
St. John, 122 ; of the Kingdom of Heaven, 182 ; a 
message to all mankind, 222.; its starting-point and 

reward 223 

Gratitude to God, finds outlet in Sacrifice . . 57, 58 

" Greatest Happiness of Greatest Number " . . . 100 

Greece and Rome, legends of 127, 128 

Greek myths. 111 ; Greek plays, how connected with the 

present time Ill, 112 



Habit of measuring ourselves by others 

" Hallowed be Thy Name " .... 

Hatred, not natural to be without objects of, 60; 

eous 

Healing, we all need 

Hindooism 

History connected with all subjects, 126 ; Fronde's 

Holy Ghost, belief in the 

Holy Spirit, guidance of the 

Hooker, reference to . . . 

Hope, our need of, 188 ; evils of lack of, 196, 197 •, 

ings of 

Humanity, Worship of . . . 



. 180 
. 204 
right- 

170, 171 
. 187 

209, 210 
. 110 
. 221 
. 224 
. 50 



bless- 



. 202 
63-65 



GENERAL INDEX. 261 

Humbling us, God's different modes of, 10 ; Our need of 

humbling ourselves 22, 23 

Humility, false 4 

Hunt, Holman, picture of tbe "Awakened Conscience" 

by 152 



I 



" I am come that tbey might have life " . . . . 222 

I, the word 3 

Immortality, Buckle's reason for believing in, 42 ; Faith 

in 248, 249 

' ' Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these " 20 
Indifference, the feeling to be dreaded .... 10 
Inspired men, 43 ; moments in human lives, 48 ; Inspi- 
ration or Imposture 68, 69 

Intolerance 65 

Isaiah, Vision of, referred to .12 

Israel, a peculiar people 39 



J 



Jacob, as an illustration of unrighteous dealing, 45 ; 

reference to 220 

Jameson, Mrs., her "Lives of the Poets," quoted . 149-151 

Job, Book of 117 

John, St., cited, 12, 217; mistaken views of his char- 
acter and countenance, 38, 39, 148 ; his Gospel not 

obscure 122 

Johnson, his opinion of Burke, 40 ; his opinion of " Para- 
dise Lost," 112 

Joy, to be true, must be shared with others ... 2 

Judas, the sop given to 47 

" Just, the, shall live by faith," .... 232,238 



262 GENERAL INDEX. 



k Kempis, Thomas 44, 45 

Kingdom, of God, 165; of Heaven, within us, 225, 235, 

236 ; of Light, mightier than that of darkness . 252 



Labor question, the 88-90; 94, 95 

Lamb, Charles, cited 105 

Learning and Leisure not necessarily connected, 14, 15 ; 

and Work should be harmonized .... 90 
Lent, Epistle for Sunday before, 119, 120; thoughts in, 

207 ; on the season of 207, 208 

Liberty, not doing what we like, 11; and Truth, in- 
separable, 11 ; of Conscience, 73, 98, 161; what it is 

not 80 

Lies, love of 221 

Life, highest, that of self-sacrifice, 11 ; difficulty of con- 
necting sentiments with, 1 ; force of words in, 1 ; 
individual and for others, 23; highest perfection 

of, 2H, 29; in the present 219,220 

Light and Intelligence 74 

Literature, of women, its aim, 115 ; Classic revival of 128, 129 

Lives changed by faith in Christ 218 

Lord's Prayer 199, 200 

Love, of God, 7 ; to those with whom we live, 34 ; of 
Truth, 191; of the world, 32, 33, 203,204; of God 
the starting-point of the Gospel . . . 223, 239 

Loyola, reference to 45 

Luther, why he reverenced St. Paul, 38 ; compared with 

Thomas a Kempis 45 

M 

Macaulay, cited 72 

Macbeth, story of, essentially true .... 130, 131 

Mahomet 69 

Mahometanism, central idea of . . 69, 211, 250, 251 



21, 22 
Gospel of . . 119 
141 
217 
53 



his treatise on Edii 



GENERAL INDEX. 263 

Man, wise, does not talk of himself, 37 ; more glorious 
than a hero, 40 ; when worthy of reverence, 44 ; as 
a spiritual being, 94; " Man of Sorrows," painters' 
conception of the, 148 ; thoughts of the . . 234, 235 

" Manfred," Lord Byron's 131, 132 

Mankind, selfishness, enemy of .... 52, 209 

Marcus Aurelius, character of, 77; his admiration of 
Roman qualities, 77, 78 ; reference to, 80 ; his sense 
of the word, duty 178 

Mary and Martha 

Matthew, St., special calling of, 118 

Mendelssohn, reference to 

Message to the Spirit 

Micah, cited .... 

Milton, 103; our Hebrew poet, 113; 
cation .... 

Minister, meaning of the word 

Miracles, the .... 

Misery, secret of most of our . 

Missions to the Heathen, 173, 174; true spirit of . 25 

Mistakes of mankind, how treated by Divine Teacher 

Moods, not left to our 

Mother and Son, relation of 34, 35 

Music as an instrument of education, 139, 140-142, 154, 
a common language, 140-141 ; gift of, a bond of 
sympathy with others, 142 ; efiect of music on the 
uneducated 142, 152-154 

N 

Napoleon, an Ascetic 79, 80 

Nero, alluded to 76 

Newspapers Ill 

Noah, faith of 57 

Novels, Domestic, 132, 133; Analytical, 133, 134; of 
Fielding, 134, 135; of Thackeray, 135; of Scott, 

106, 136, 137 



114 
157 
230 

11 
1, 252 

17 
220 



264 



GENERAL INDEX. 



Obedience to mere custom, 15 ; of Christ . . . 215 
Obligation of Christians, 169, 170; of intellectual gifts, 

177; of domestic affections .... 177, 178 
Opinion, Public, never an originator, 6; the mighty 

power of 24, 25 

Opinions, unsettled, j-et bigoted, 2, 3; how best learned 7 
Ourselves, we must go out of . . . 28, 29, 179, 180 



Parable, of Talents, 20, 21; of Unjust Steward, 56, 57; 
of tares, — of leaven, 118; of Old and New Bottles 

235, 236 
"Paradise Lost," final expression of Milton's thought 

112, 113 

Party, triumph of a 1G8, 169 

Passion, Divine, meaning of the .... 243, 244 

Passion Week, GG, 67 ; mystery of 221 

Paul, St., his chief thought, 37, 164; reverenced by 
Luther as a deliverer, 38 ; cited, 62 ; faith and hope 
of 220 



'♦Peace I leave with you," 215,219 

Peace, true 29, 30, 219 

Peter, St., denial of 46 

" Pilgrim's Progress," universal influence of . . . 113 
Plato and Aristotle compared, 107; Dialogues of, 108; 

Plato's " Republic " referred to . . . .139 

Poet, not a special man 106 

Power of divine sentences learned by putting in practice 13 
Prayer, true spirit of, 61; for Light, 193; Lord's Prayer 

199-200 

Prayer-book 119, 120 

120, 189 
. 181 
16, 17 
. 121 



Praj-ers, of Christ, 183, 187, 188 ; of the Church 
Preachers, week-day and Sunday 

Problem, greatest of all 

Progress, Bible contains the promise of 



GENERAL INDEX. 265 

Prophets, false and tnie 53 

Psalms, Book of, 122 ; diflferent Psalms brought before 

us in the Service, 123; how inspired . . . 125 

Public opinion, never an originator, 6 ; mighty power of 

24, 25 

Q 

Quick-sightedness in detecting errors of others . . 162 
Quiet times, test of character 48 

R 

Raphael's picture of the " Transfiguration," 144; of the 

" Vision of Ezekiel," 144, 145 ; influence of . . 151 

Receiver and things received 54 

Recompense, for implicit trust in friends and in God, 8, 

9 ; true recompense is deliverance from selfishness 56 

Redeemer, Our ' . . . . 231 

Redemption, the 244, 245 

Reform, Church, connected with Social, 87; in popular 
education necessary, 85, 86, 90, 91; in trade and 

commerce 87 

Ralation of Master and Servant . . 95, 96, 160, 161 

Religions of the World 211, 212 

Renan, reference to 109 

Repentance, hidden, 13, 14 ; we should be preachers of 167, 168 
Reputation not necessary for usefulness ... 6 

Rest and learning united 14 

Restlessness, not activity, 22 ; curse of mankind . . 27 

Retirement 3 

Reward for love of truth . . . . , . .191 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, saying of 147 

Rich young man, reference to 54, 55 

Righteousness, all have the capacity for ... 54 

Roman statesmanship, quality of, ^Q ; Roman love of 

truth ... 79 

Rome and Greece, legends of 127 

" Romola," story of , 129 ; Maurice's opinion of . . 130 



266 



GENERAL INDEX. 



S 



Sacrifice, diflferent meaiiino:s of the word, 26, 165; an 
outlet of gratitude to God, 57, 58 ; of Christ, 229 ; 

power of 243, 244 

Savonarola, temptation of, 42 ; reference to . . .130 
Science, man of, necessarily childlike, 54; unchristian 

mode of teaching, 86, 87 ; power of . . 143, 144 

Scott, novels of 106, 136, 137 

Scripture, our mistakes in studjing, 114; real reverence 

for, 117; should not be made an idol of . . .124 

Sects, bitterness of 240, 241 

Self-centred man, 63 ; self-distrust, cowardice of, 5 ; 
self-exaltation, the Balaam sin of mankind, 40; self- 
sacrifice, 7, 8, 14; last point of divine education . 8 
Selfishness, enemy of mankind .... 52, 209 



Sentiments, difliculty of carrying out in life . 
Service, elevation of the idea of . . . 
Shakespeare, cited, 36; works of, 51; teaching of, 104; 
historical plays of, 104, 105 ; and Milton, reference to 
Sinccritv, true 



Socialism, Christian .... 

Social Morality, establishment of, 101, 102; 

Morality the starting-point of . 
Societ}', human relations, not possessions the 

of, 5, 89 ; its demands upon us . 
Socrates, character of ... . 
Soldiers and sailors, conscience in . 
Solomon, understanding heart of . 
Son of God, his obedience, 217; our theories 

we are sons of God . 

Son of Man 

Spenser, works of 

Spirit of God in us, 191 ; of the Living God 
Steele, characterized by Thackeray 
Strength for work, 187; secret of . 
Strikes, evils of . . . . 



1 

157 

105 
. 21 
87, 94 
Domestic 

. 133 
true basis 

. 84 

74-76 

. 176, 177 

. 18 



of, 245; if 



. 228 
. 227 
50, 113 
. 233 
. 41 
198, 215 
. 88 



GENERAL INDEX. 267 

Superstition, its origin 206 

Swift contrasted witli Addison and Steele . . .41 

Symbols 226, 229 

Sympathy, the essence of genius, 70; the longing for 

personal 190 

T 

Talents, parable of . . . . '. • . 20, 21 

Taylor, Jeremy 50 

Teacher, qualifications of a, 93 ; teachers of past ages, 

our indebtedness to 161, 162 

Teaching, learning by, 1; of working-men, 85; true 
mode of, 92, 93; in art, 149; sublimest, the most 

homely 208, 209 

Temptations, many to which we are not exposed . 7, 14 
Testament, New, 109 ; teaches Christ, not Christianity 124 
Thackeray, his opinion of Addison, Steele and Swift, 
41; peculiarities as a novel-writer, 135; "weekday 

preachers " 181 

Theology, what it is 205 

Thought and prayer 201 

Tito, character of , in " Romola," . . • . 129,130 
Transfiguration, rare moments of, in human lives, 9 ; 

Raphael's picture of 144, 145 

Trials, not to expect 218 

Trust, implicit, in friends and in God, 8,9; in Christ, 
167; cannot trust God too much, 241, 242; force of 

the word 243 

Truth, " that which lies at the bottom of all trowings," 
186; God's truth, 192; Love of, 191; Spirit of , 239, 
240 ; is mighty, and must prevail .... 253 
Truths must be found out slowly, 2 ; some would give 

us the husks of 37 

U 

Unbelief among working-men 85, 86 

Understanding heart, prayer for .... 190, 191 





> 


42 




212, 


213 
214 




56 


, 57 




205, 


206 



268 GENERAL INDEX. 

Unfaithfulness in little things 

Unity of religions, 211, 212; of aspirations 

Universal Worship, what it is . 

Unjust stewai'd, parable of . . . 

Unrest, our, cause of ... . 



Vision of Isaiah, 12; of Ezekiel, 145, 225, 226; visions, 

heavenly 226 

W 

"Walk to Ennnaus, reference to . . . . 6Q, 67 

'' What ^^hall we have therefore?" 164 

AVliitsuntidc, associations of, 221 ; blessings of . . 223 

"Will be clone. Thy" 201 

Wise man does not talk of himself 87 

Word of God 63, 217 

Words, force of, 1; those in daily use, sacred, 3; com- 
pared to gunpowder ^ 

Work, call to, 52, 53, 160; ""Work out your own salva- 
tion." 62; of the present day, feverish, not thor- 
ough. 83; each has his appointed, 157, 151). 160; 
fretting about the result of, 158; of human love, 
158; without fear of the future .... 159 

Worker, never a bustler 1"^ 

Working-class, elevation of, the tme basis of pros- 
perity, 82-84 ; music as an instrument of education 
among ........ 139-142 

Working-men, our education given us to help the, 13; 
wish of, to be roused out of torpor, 17; unbelief 
among, 85, f<C,', associations of, 88, 94; not drudges 96 
World, our true purpose in the, 7; those who love the — 

do not understand it. 32. 33 : love not the . 203, 204 
Worth beginning, nothing that has not the principle of 

life in it 15, 16 



GENERAL INDEX, 269 

Worship, influence of, on character . . . .59 

Worship of Humanity 63-65 

X 

Xenophon, his view of Socrates . , • . 74, 75 

Y 

Young men, doubt among 98, 100 

Z 

Zeal, when excellent, or otherwise , , , , . 22 



/ 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



Chips from the White Houi?e. — 12 luo. 480 pp. $1.50 
Ifhat the pveas says of it: 

III this liandsouie voluuie of five hundred pa^es Jiave been 
dfought together some of the most inipuriant utterances of 
our twenty pr.'sidents, carefully selected from speeches and 
Addresses, public docuinenls and pri/ale correspondence, 
; .d touching up<3n a large variety of subjects, — Golde*, 
Rule, Boston. 

Most of the extracts are dated and accunipaiiied by brief 
ezplanalioKS of tlie circumstances under which they were 
written, and the vol me, therefore, if judiciously read, will 
^ive a clearer idea of the character of the men than can bo 
gathered elsewhere by reading a small library through.— 
iVeio York Graphic. 

The selections are made wltii judgment and taste, and 
represent not only the political si.U.us of the ili.stinguished 
writers, but Aho their social ami domestic charactejisiics. 
The book is interi'^lin; in itself, and specially valuable aa 
a convenient book of reference for students of American 
Jiistory. Its raeclianical presentation is all that can be 
asked. — Providence Journal, 

E.ich chapter is prefaced by a brief synoposis of the life 
and services of its subject, and most of the extracts are dated, 
with brief explanations of the circumstances under which 
tiiey were written. The work, in fact, is a handbook. It 
13 convenient for reference of American history. It is 
printed in clear, large type, is ta-stefully and strongly bound, 
and is supplemented by a very full index. — Wonian^s Jour^ 
nal, Boston. 

The book is thoroughly good ; none better could be 
placed in the hands of young persons. By the liiiht of 
tliese they can see the reflectitm of the character of the 
grand men wlio have been called to rule over the Nation 
during its existence. No other nation ever hai such a 
succsssion of rulers, where so few h we proved failures.-' 
biter Oceuw . Cfiicaao. 



New Publications. 

The Young Folks' Bible History. By Charlotte M. 
Tonge. Boston: D. Lotlirop& Co. Price $1.50. The pres- 
ent volume is not only important in itself, but it is an addi- 
tional proof of the wonderful versatility of the author. 
The same liand that so successfully set before young readere 
the stories of the growth and development of the different 
countries of Europe, here puts the grand old Bible story 
into a form which the youngest readers can easily compre- 
hend. The language is simple and the facts are told in 
modern style; one great stumbling-block to the understand- 
ing being thus removed. Beginning with the account of the 
creation, succeeding chapters carry along the Scriptural rec- 
ord to the time of the prophets, and from their day down to 
the appearance of the Saviour upon the earth. The life and 
teachings of Jesus are especially dwelt upon. The volume 
is profusely illustrated with drawings by English artists. We 
cannot too cordially commend the plan of this work, nor the 
excellent njanner in which it is carried out. It will be found 
not only valuable for home teaching, but for use in the in- 
fant classes of Sunday-schools. 



The New York Tribune in a notice of Amanda B. Harris's 
*'How We Went Birds' -nesting " says: * It is written with 
charming simplicity of style, and its ornithology is taken 
directly from nature and not from books. There is some- 
thing of the spirit of adventure in the book, and as the 
youthful reader of dime novels is filled with a desire to go 
out West and hunt Indians, so the boys and girls who read 
this little volume will be prompted to visit the haunts of the 
birds and will have their powers of observation directed and 
sharpened." 



New publications. 



The Old OAKF.r; IJucket. By Samuel Woodwortl . 
Qiiartx) Holiday edition. Boston: D, Lolhiop <% Co. Pric» 
$1.50. Of all the illui<tiated quarto pit^seUfaiiuu bookx yet 
issued, iliis is by ail odds the most artistic and tasteful. The 
art of tlie designer, engraver an<' printer has in turn been 
exhausted to bring it as near perfection aa possible. Tha 
drawing!* are from the skiiiui pencil of Mi>s Humphrey, and 
represent her best work. The engraying is hy W. N. Clos- 
Bon, Avhone reputation in tliat line is equal to that of any 
other man in the country, and the printing is from nevr 
type on lieavy paper with broad margins and gilt edges. In 
general style and binding the volume is uniform with Th^ 
Isineiy and Sine, Lrytimj, etc. 

The Stoky- of Fouu Acokns. By Alice B. Engle. 111. 
Bo>ton: D. L'jthrop & Co. Price !?l.uO. Children who like 
fairy stories tUI find in this handsome volume a fountain of 
delight. The author possesses rare talent for interesting tlie 
young, ami has here turned it to the best advantage. She 
has furnished a fascinating story, and has iT;geni<nisly 
woven into it bits of poelr>' and song liom famous authors 
whicli will find easy entrance intc.- the mind and create an 
appetite for more. The illustrations are among Miss Lath- 
bury's best, and do their part toward making the volume 
attractive. 

A capital idea is represented in the new book, Historic 
Pictures, suggested by the success of last season's vf-lume, 
Write Your Oivn Stories. It consists of a collection of pict- 
ures illustrating places and events of historic inlere^t. 
tliirty in number, with three blank pages aftei- each picture, 
which are to he utilized by the boys and girls in writing an 
acc<uint()f 'he incitlenis which have made the various places 
larious. Tlie pulilishers offer a series of cash prizes for 
competitors, the lists to remain open until July 1, 1-S82. 
The one who sends the best series of stories or hisloricj,-' 
descriptions of the pictures, will receive $25.00 ; the authc^ 
of the second best, $15.00, and the third in point of excc^ 
*eiice. $l0.uj. 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 

The Tempter Behind. By the Author of " Israel Mori* 
Overman." Boston: D. Loth rop & Co. Price $1.25. Most 
readers of fiction will remember " Israel Mort, Overman," a 
book which created several years ago a profound sensation 
botli in this country and in England. It was a work of in- 
tense strength and showed such promise on the part of the 
anonymous author that a succeeding work from the same 
Land has ever since been anxiously looked for, in the belief 
that, sliould it be written, it would make a yet more decided 
impression. " The Tempter Behind," now just brought out 
in this country, shows that the estimate of the public as to 
the ability of the author was not too high. It is in every 
way a higher and stronger work, and one that cannot but 
have a marked effect wherever it is read. It is not merely an 
intensely interesting story; something more earnest than 
the mere excitement of incident underlies the book. It is 
the record of the struggles of a young and ambitious student 
against the demon of drink. Tie is an orphan — the ward of 
a rich uncle who proposes to settle his entire property upon 
him in case he conforms to his wishes. It is the desire of 
the uncle that he sliall become a clergyman, a profession for 
which the young man has a strong and natural preference. 

Unknown to his uncle, he has formed the habit of social 
drinking at college from which lie cannot extricate himself. 
The terrible tlli^^'t for intoxicants paralyses his will, and 
renders liim a slave to the cup. Every effort he makes is 
unsuccessful. He loses rank at college, and is afterward 
dismissed frofu his post as private secretary to an official of 
the government, on account of the neglect of his studies and 
duties, but without exposure. Ills uncle knows his failures, 
but not their cause, and demands that he either enter the 
ministerial profession for whicli he has prepared himself, oi 
leave the shelter of his roof. The young man, who has toe 
much principle to assume a position which he fears he may 
disgrace, does not confide in his uncle, and secretly departi 
from the liouse, leaving behind him a letter of farewell, de- 
termined to make one more trial by himself, and among 
strangers, to break the chains which bind him so closely 
The story of his ox[)erietices, trials and temptations are viv- 
idly and almost painfully told, with their results. The book 



NEW PUBL.ICATIONS. 

The Only Way Out. By Mrs. Jennie Fowler Wil ,iig. 
Illustrated. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.50. fhi 
rather enigmatical title of the handsome volume before ua 
is fully explained in the closing chapter of the story. The 
author endeavors to show that there is but one sure way 
out of the darkness into which we are plunged by earthly 
crosses and trials, and tliat is an earnest faith in and reif 
ance upon Christ. The lesson sought to be conveyed if 
mainly through the experience of Joseph Craydon, a bright 
generous-hearted young merchant, who is cursed with an 
appetite for liquor so strong that when temptation comes lie 
has no power to resist it. Pledges, promises and resolutions 
made in his sober moments avail nothing when attacked by 
the terrible desire for drink. In all his struggles with ibe 
habit which is steadily working his ruin, he seeks no help 
outside of himself, depending only upon his own strength of 
will to overcome the tempter. He falls at last, a victim to 
his weakness and blindness in refusing to look for aid 
whence all aid comes. Says one of the characters in com- 
menting upon his fate — "'They may talk as they will, it 
takes a solid ba^^is of rocky conviction to hold one to this 
work of mastering the evil that is rampant in the world. 
You may pile up figures and facts, pathos and argumert, 
but unless God touches the conscience you can't depend 
upon a man for a steady pull through the breakers. Ad re&l 
reformatory power is vested in the Lord Jesus Christ.'* 

So AS BY Fire. By Margaret Sidney. III. Boston: D. 
Lor.lirop & Co. Price $1.25. Anything from the author of 
" Five Little Peppers" will be read with paperness and -with 
the certainty beforehand tliat it will be well worth reading. 
iS'o a.s by Fire is a story full of earnest purpc^se. Tlie lesson 
it te;iches is that it is only through gieat sorrow ajid tiibula- 
tion that some souls are purified; that the trinls and vexa- 
tions and disappointments of this world, if riglitly .nccepled 
and turned to use, make clean the heart " as Vy fire." To 
impress this fact strongly upon the mind of the reader is 
the constant aim of the autlior. It is not a child's 1 (;('k, 
alth()ui:h some of the more entertaining characters in its 
p*ges are children. Its purpose is to stiengthen ihoR« Viho 
are bo"sred down by trouble, atid to inspire them with laitk 
ftu the final reward of constant well doiv.g. 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



KouND THE WoELD LETTERS. By Lucy S. Baiiibridg©. 
Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.50. A bright, fresh 
book of travel, wriiten in a gossipy, unconventional style, 
and brimful of interest from cover to cover. The author 
is the wife of a well-known Baptist clergyman of Providence, 
R. I., W. F. Bainbridge, a lady of culture and observation, 
and possessed of a fund of humor which gives an agreeable 
flavor to her book. Mr. and Mrs. Bainbridge Irft Provi- 
dence on the firsit day of January, 1870, for San Francisco, 
reaching that city in lime to study its lii)ns and take the 
steamer Tokio for Japan February 18. At lokohama they 
spent tw^o weeks, and at Tokio three, and then set out upon 
a journey to the interior, visiting a number of the lesser 
towns and cities. From Japan they sailed for Shanghai, 
which city ihey reached two days before the arrival of 
Gen. Grant. Mrs. Bainbridge gives a very spicy account 
of the reception of the General and the doings during his 
slay. The stay in China is even longer than that in Japan. 
From Hong Kong they sail for Singapore, a journey of fifteen 
hundred miles, make a tour through southern India, visit- 
ing Calcutta, Benares, Lucknow, Delhi and Cawnpore. After 
India comes Egyi)t and the pyrainitls, then the Holy Land ; 
then Cyprus. Kliodes, Smyrna and Greece; then Venice, 
Bavaria, Switzerland, France, England and home. It will be 
seen that the book covers unlroddcMi ground for flie most 
part, and where it does fall into the beaten track the treat- 
ment is so original as to make it as interesting as if the 
same things had never b«^en described before. We commend 
the volume to readers as a model of what a story of travel 
should be. 

Home axd School SoNr.s. By Louis C. Elson. Quarto, 
JUustratcd, cloth, $1.00. Boston : D. Lothrop & Co. In 
this volume of songs, the conjposer has endeavored to give a 
series of bright and singable melodies for children, which 
shall be absolutely free from the Irashiness which has 
characterized much of this school of work. The songs havw 
been written with a view to make them quite within the reg- 
ister of all young voices. The subjects are all well-adapied to 
their purpose, mnnv of them admitting of action, and are 
suited to the family circle as well as for public schools. 
Both words and ni'islc are the work of Mr. Elson, whoa« 
»vious efforts in various musical fieMs arc widely knowu. 



NEW PUBLIC '-.TrOK^S. 



A Book of Goldex Deeds, of alt, Ti.M::.i a:,'d Laj^da 
Gathered and narrated by ChurioUe M. Yoi.ge. llluftlraLed 
Boston: D. Lollirop & Co. Price $1.l>5. The ra;^Jdly 
increasing popularity of thij little voluimi, and the steady 
demand for it have induceii the Messrs. Lothrop to bi'ing 
out a new edition in haudrfome form and yet at a price 
"which brings it within the reach of every reader. Excellent 
as are all Miss Yonge's books, there is not one which appeals 
po strongly to young readers as this ct)llection of storiua uaaJ 
traditions, gathered from many sources, and presented for 
the purpose of inculcating a love for what is noble and trne 
in the minds of the young. The author's intention has been 
to make it a treasury, where may be found minuter particu- 
lars than are given in abridged histories, of the soul-slirring 
deeds that lend life and glory to the record of events, in the 
trust that example may inspire the spirit ol heroism aiid 
self-devotion, aiul give proof that the hi_'he<t object of ac- 
tion is not to win promotion, wealth or snccess, but simple? 
duty, mercy and loving-kindness. Miss Y'onge has chosew 
fi'oni history some of tlie most remarkable insLances <^v 
moral and physical bravery, and has clothed them in lan- 
guage befitting her theme. Many of them are familiar, but 
we have never before seen them rendered in so charming a 
form, or in a manner wliere the true motive of ac:ion was so 
jflainly and effectually brought out. The volume is printed 
in clear type, on good paper, and is attractively bound. 

Five Little Peppers; aiul How They Grew. By Mar- 
garet Sidney. Thirty-«tx illustrations by Jessie Curtis. 
Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.50. Of all the new 
juveniles in this season's list there is not one which will be 
read with more delight by the little ones than this jolly 
story. It is a genuine child's book, written by one who 
understands and sympathizes with childi-en. The incidents 
are just such a>< might have lianpened. ^nd pathos and 
humor ar.^ skilfully min?:led in their telling. The illn>ira- 
liuus are charming, and worthy the reputation of the artist 



"PANSY" BOOKS. 

Probably no livinc^ author has exerted an inrinence upon the 
American people at larsj^e, at all comparable with Pansy's. Thou- 
sands upon thousands of ifamilies read her books every week, and 
the effect in the direction of right feeling, right thinking, and 
right living is incalculable. 

Each volume 12mo. Cloth. Price, S1.50. 
Four Girls at Ch.vutauqu.v. Modkkx Pk(>phkt.s. 
Chautauqltv Girls at Home. Echoing and Re-echoing. 
Ruth Kkskine's Chossks. Tho.se IJovs. 
Ester Rikd. The Ra.sdolphs. 

Julia Ried. Tip I.kwis. 

King's Daughter. Sidney Martin's Christmas. 

Wise and Opherwise. Divers Women. 

Ester Ried "Yet Speaking." A New Graft. 
Links in Rebecca's Like. The Pocket Measure. 
From Difkerkxt Stand- !Mrs. Solomon S.mith. 

Three People. [points. The Hall in the Grote. 

Household Puzzles. Man ok the House. 

An Endless Chain. 

Each volume 12uio. Cloth. Price, $1.25. 
Cunning Workmen. Miss Priscilla Hunter and 

Grandpa's Darlin(}. My Daughter Susan. 

Mrs. Dean's Way. What She Said and 

Dr. Dean's Way. People who Haven't TiMi 

Each volume 16mo. Cloth. Price, -S 1.00. 
Next Things. Mrs. Harry Harper's 

Pansy Scrap Book. Awakening. 

Five Friends. New Year's Tangles. 

Some Young Heroines. 

Each vo/ume IGmo. Cloth. Price, $ 75. 
Getting Ahead. Jessie Wells. 

Two Hoys. Doci.%|p Journal. 

Six Little Girls. Helen Lester. 

Pansies. Bernie's White Chicken. 

That Boy Bob. Mary Burton Abroad. 

Side by Side. Price, g.RO. 

Tlie Little Pansy Series, 10 vols. Boards, $\.(\0. Cloth, .'i?4.00 

Mother's Boys and Girls' Library', 12 vols. Quarto Boards, $3M 

Pansy I'rimary Library, 30 vol. Cloth. Price, ^7.50. 

Half Hour Library. Octavo, 8 vols. Price. $3.20. 



THE CELEDRATED 

looo. Prize Series, i6 Vols., 

THE ORIGINAL $500. PRIZE STORIES, 

THE IS^EW $500. I'RIZE SERIES, 
Julia A. Eastman's Works, 

Ella FaiTnan's Works, 
THE PANSY BOOKS, 30 Vols., which have an increas 
ing popularity greater than any other books for youn^ 
people in this country, 

BIOGRAPHIES, 

HISTORIES, 
ILLUSTRATED NATURAL HISTORY 

AND SCIENCE For Young People, 

PICTURE-BOOKS FOR CHILDREN, 

ILLUSTRATED WORKS, POETICAL GIFT-BOOKS. 

and 
WHOLESOME STORIES IN GREAT VARIETY, 

are publislied by 

D. LOTHROP & Co., 

BOSTON. 

Illustrated Catalogues free. Send for one. \ 

" D. Lothrop ^ Co.^ 32 Franklin street^ Boston^ 
are perJiajys ahead of all other publishers m pro- 
ducing sp)lendid volumes for the entertainment oj 
young people. ^^ — Our Chuech Paper. 



RECENT BOOKS. 

Tensie "Walton. By Mrs. S. K. Graham Clark. Bos* 
ton: D. Lotlirop & Co. $1.50. Of llie many good books 
"whicli the Messrs. Lotlirop have prepared for the shelves of 
Sunday-school libraries, " Teusie Walton" is one of the 
best. It is a sweet, pure story of girl life, quiet as the flow 
of a brook, and yet of sufficient interest to hold the attention, 
of the most careless reader. Tensie is an orphan, who has 
found a home with an uncle, a farmer, some distance from 
the city. Her aunt, a coarse, vulgar woman, and a tyrant 
in the household, does her best to humiliate her by making 
her a domestic drudge, taking away her good clothing and 
exchanging it for coarse, ill-fitting garments, and scolding 
her from morning till night. This treatment develops a 
spirit of resistance; the mild and affectionate little girl be- 
comes passionate and disobedient, and the house is the 
scene of continual quarrels. Fortunately, her uncle insists 
upon her attending school, and in the teacher. Miss Gray, 
she finds her first real friend. In making her acquaintance 
a new life begins for her. She is brought in contact with 
new and better influences, and profiting by them becomes in 
time a sunbeam in her uncle's house, and the means of 
softening the heart and quieting the tongue of the aunt who 
was once her terror and dread. Mrs. Clark has a very pleas- 
ing style, and is especially skilful in the construction of her 
stories. f 

"Yensie Walton" is a story of great power, by a new 
author. It aims to show that God uses a stern discipline to 
form the noblest characters, and that the greatest trials of 
life often prove the greatest blessings. The story is subor- 
dinate to this moral aim, and the earnestness of the author 
breaks out into occasional preaching. But the story is full 
of striking incident and scenes of great pathos, with occa- 
sional gleams of humor and fun by way of relief to the more 
tragic parts of the narrative. The characters are strongly 
drawn, and, in general, are thoroughly human, not gifted 
with impossible perfections but having those infirmities of 
tiic fiesh which make us all akin. 



Little Folks' Every Day Book. 

JtYHMES AND ILLUSTRA'llONS FOR EVERY DAI. 

MAY i8th. 



A song of a nest : — 
There was once a nest in a hollow ; 
Down in the mosses and knot-grass pressed 
Soft and warm, and f ull lo the brim: 








MAY igxH. 

" Good night ! " said the hen, when hat 

supper was done, 
To Fanny who stood in the door, 
"Good night," answered she, "come back 

in the morn, 
And you and your chicks shall have more." 



MAY 20TH. 

There's a merry brown thrush sitting up 
in the tree, 
•* He's singing to me I He's singing t'^ 

me !" 
.\ndwhat does hesay, little girl, Tttle bo; ? 
"Oh, the world's runn'nc over with ioy ** 

Edited by AMANDA B. HARRIS. 

rWELVE COLOR DESIGN'S EMBLEMATIC OF THE MONTHS* 
By Gf.orge F. Barnes. 

Sauare iSmo, tinted edges, Ji oo. 

8>. LOTHROP 8c CO., Publishers, 30 and 32 Franklin St , Boston 





** leUal American magazirui!* 

It is a fact acknowledged by 
the English press that American 
magazines, by enterprise, able edi- 
torship, and liberal expenditure for 
the finest of current art and litera- 
ture, have won a rank far in ad- 
vance of European magazines. 

It is also a fact that for 
young people 

WIDE AWAKE 



stands foremost \ J^^^XfitCi/ 

Each year's numbers contain a thousand quarto pages, covering the \sndest 
ranyje of literature of interest and value to youiij; people, from sucli authors at 
John G. Whittier, Charles Egbert Craddock, ^!rs. A. D. T. Whitney, Susan 
Coolide:e, Edward Everett Hale, Arthur Gilman, Edwin Arnold, Rose 
Kingsley, Dinah Mulock Craik, Marparet Sidney, Helen Hunt Jackson 
(H. H.). Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elbridge S. Brooks and hundreds of 
ethers ; and half a thousand illustrations by F. H. Lungren, W. T. Smedley, 
Miss L. B. Humphrey, F. S. Church, ISIary Hallock Foote, F. Childe 
Hassam, E. H. Garrett, Hy. Stndhani and other leadinp American artists* 
O.'VL.Y 93.00 A VEAR. PKO.^PECTU.S FREE. 

WiDB Awake is the official organ of the C. Y. F. R. U. The Required 
Readings are also issued simultaneously as the Chautauqua Young Folks' 
Journal, with additional matter, at 75 cents a year. 

For the younger JBoys aud Girl* and the Babies: 






Our Little Men Babyland 

and Women, 'Never fails to carry de 
With its 75 full-pagejlight to the babies and 
pictures a year, and num- rest to the mammas, with 
berless smaller, and its|its large beautiful pict- 
delightful stories a n d ures, its merrj- stories and 
poems, is mjst admirable jingles, in large type, en 
lor the youngest readers, jneavy paper. 

1 1 .00 a year. 50 ctt. a year. 

Send for specimen copies, eirculars, eic. , U 

LOTHROP & CO., BOSTON, 



The Pansy, 

Edited by the famous 
author of the " Pansy 
Books,'' is eaually 
charming and suitable for 
week-^ay and Sunday 
reading. Always contain! 
a serial by " Pansy." 
$1.00 ayear. 

M/ PttblisJters, 

MASS., U. S. A. 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



021 231 



345 2 








•'«'••. . 'V'- 
fi f • At-'f^iV-'.- 



